Time is a world I don't know how to walk.
Everything that happens to me feel like it just happened and also happened a thousand years ago... I still feel the shock and anger of being slammed into a wall by my teacher in high school. I jammed with other musicians in an inspiring "we could become a band" moment of perfect synergy, and was so acutely aware that I was formulating that specific memory as it was happening that I couldn't even BE in that moment and share in that experience that the others were having.
I still feel the sting of childhood bullying like I just walked through the door with a bloody nose. I hear a song for the first time and I know I will want to listen to it dozens of times, so much so that I have instantly processed that entire future sequence of events and immediately skipped to the part where I've grown numb to the initial emotional impact of the song and it already means nothing to me. The girl who broke my heart has a ghostly hand wrapped around it still. Every wound is fresh.
I feel like I live outside of time watching all my memories fall across each other like dominoes in a single continuous moment. Future nostalgia, distant present, an endless never comprised of the same day lived over and over because every day is the first day, and before I know it I've sleepwalked through the best decades of my life with no concept of the passage of time.
And I know I should mourn the time I wasted, but every second of it feels equally the same distance from me. I can't miss the time I wasted because I just got started in life... And yet I blinked and my youth was gone. I'm still there but it's gone. I can feel the cool rain landing on taughter skin, the spring in the step of youthful vigor. It disorients me to reach out with a child's hand and grasp with an aging man's fingers.
I just composed my first poem and foresaw an entire future in writing that I anticipated with such clarity I never needed to bother pursuing it. I'm walking across a chilly school field with the taste of undercooked toast still on my lips, dreading my first day, as I graduate and thank the stars I never have to look back. My best friend betrayed me and my rage at him will always be at its peak. This can't be normal...
I don't understand what time is to people. I make a mistake and I get nauseous from the cycle of thinking back to it so many times I am sick of it, even while the consequences are still hot. I remember why I cried as a child and sometimes still want to. I remember every argument, every time I was right, every injustice, every memory is whiplash. I feel the imprint of every impact burned into my skin.
I seem to exist in a continuous chrysalis of experience. And everything is so close and so far away that I don't fathom the extremes. Did I miss that appointment a week ago? 5 months ago? Couldn't tell you, to me they seem the same. Surely this isn't how it is suppose to be.
Time is a stranger who knows me too well, while I hardly know myself. I feel removed from it, and yet terrifyingly at its mercy, like I just hit the snooze button on my alarm and closed my eyes for a second only to find 5 years have flashed by. It's very unsettling to be under the thrall of a force you can't really perceive...
Why haven't I updated this blog in years? Because to me it was just the other day I posted here last. It's like the fast forward button on my remote is broken and I keep just scanning foward a whole ass decade the instant my mind wanders, and when I stop zoning out I panickingly hit pause only to become aware of how much of this limited lifespan I just burned through.
Maybe I do this to myself. Maybe it's a consequence of how I choose to be. I live every day unchanging as if I will live forever, and I forget sometimes that... I won't. Perhaps I mediated through a vision of the life I could have lived. I'm so very distant from it all because I'm never really here. Or maybe I'm already dying, and this is all just my life flashing before my eyes.
