(~11 minutes reading time)
ONE. A miracle happened on Christmas day 2021: After a 7-year delay and $4.4 billion in cost overruns, the James Webb space telescope was finally launched. It will reach its destination a million miles away before the end of this month and start sending back data by the middle of the year if all goes as planned. These are benchmarks in “time,” that sloppy method by which we earthbound creatures have decided to organize chaos for our convenience. The telescope will train its powerful infrared- and ultra-infrared-seeing lenses on the origins of everything we know: the faint first light of the universe after the Big Bang, the ionized soup of primary elements, the nurseries where stars, planets, and systems began to form. Space is a creation of both time and distance. When you look up at the moon, you’re looking at a picture of the moon “snapped” a second and a half ago. The sunlight you see is over 8 minutes old. So when the James Webb peers out into the farthest reaches of space, it sees the beginning of time itself. The light it perceives has traveled toward us over eons, bringing evidence of things that happened eons ago. In a macrocosmic context, there’s no Now that exists for us, only remnants of long ago.
TWO. My dear fellow pandemizens, is this familiar? 2020 and 2021 have collapsed into one long super-year in my mind. I form a sentence such as, “Last summer I did this and such” only to realize that I’m speaking about 2019 or even 2018. I reminisce about something lovely that happened ages ago only to glance at the calendar and realize it was this past October. A global-trauma-warped perspective has deepened the normal disorientation I feel when I realize how quickly life goes by (despite being filled with sometimes endless days). A random Facebook memory and picture come up from 11 years ago and I think what in the holy fuck is this? Who was living that life then? I don’t recall being there. I don’t recall being that person. When was her son ever that short? Hey, whatever happened to that cute shirt she’s wearing? Let’s call this a Reverse Proust. Instead of my entire past spontaneously rebuilding itself in my imagination upon the sniffing of a pastry, one digital image blasted in the morning can alienate me from my alleged self.
THREE. At nineteen years old I possessed a decent if not quite mathematical understanding of Einstein’s special theory of relativity. I could explain to you the insight he had while sitting on a train at a platform in Bern, Switzerland, idly staring at the town’s clock tower, I could explain the absolute speed of light and why it necessitates time dilation, I could walk you through the circumstances by which you might travel at light-speed into space and come back younger than your grandchild, I could even wax speculative on what’s supposed to be happening in the inscrutable last few scenes of 2001: A Space Odyssey. That was then. I don’t know a damn thing about any of it now. It’s the same as never having known it at all. There is a (forgive me) black hole at the center of my brain.
FOUR. I recently got a part-time job in the marketing side of the indie music business. In December I was trained by someone thirty years younger than me. HOW DOES THIS HAPPEN? Everybody. Is. So. Fucking. Young. But also: my college reunion is this spring and my high school reunion will be in 2023, and I know how we’ll all feel when we see each other. Everybody. Is. So. Fucking. Old.
FIVE. I’m still close friends with two women I met in middle school, one who lives in Portugal and the other in Los Angeles. With them, as with so many far-flung yet well-known friends from youth or young adulthood, time and distance collapse when we get on the phone or Zoom. The cliche obtains: We pick up exactly where we left off. Now, due to social media, I’ve gathered so many more “new” old friends among people I first met decades ago. You may have done the same. Often, there’s a complete lack of awkwardness, a robust familiarity that arrives with the very first conversation. A common history and culture connect you still, even if your lives have sent you in wildly different directions, and a 90-minute catch-up call flies by, full of warmth and nostalgia.
SIX. On the other hand, a 90-minute cocktail date with someone you knew you wouldn’t like very much—yet you agreed out of some absurd self-help-y notion about letting yourself be surprised, breaking out of your comfort zone, trying something different—UGH, INTERMINABLE, an hour and a half of quiet, creeping hell. You fake having a pleasant conversation with this person, but you are not at all present. Your mind is fixated simultaneously on the door you’re going to escape out of ASAP, and that stupid, stupid moment last week when you ignored your gut and said Sure when you should have said No, Thank You. You knew, you knew, you already knew! Because time spent in the world, time existing in a singular body and more or less consistent mind actually means something. Experience means something. Knowing yourself means something. You don’t wake up every morning a tabula rasa. You have your ways, you are set in them. You are made of your memories, even if you seem to be forgetting almost everything these days. Your deep self-knowledge has a predictive power that can’t be denied. Your past is your future is your present all at once, and you are still the same person through a dozen life transformations.
SEVEN. On the other other hand, sometimes you meet a person and know within a few hours or days that they will mark your life forever, no matter how little time you have together.
EIGHT. “The pure present is an ungraspable advance of the past devouring the future. In truth, all sensation is already memory.” Yeah, yeah, yeah, Henri Bergson. We get it. /eyeroll/
NINE. Two weeks ago I seriously contemplated a reunion with a boyfriend from my early twenties. He had dumped me terribly, horribly, hurtfully in 1991; then we got together again briefly so he could dump me again in 1992. There was no contact for a long time, but at some point about 10 years ago I reached out to him. I suppose I was looking for exactly what a got: an apology for his youthful dickishness, which he offered freely, and with increasing honesty and detail in bits and pieces over years of occasional emails and texts.
I accepted all the apologies, genuinely. I was glad to hear him validate certain of my own perceptions at the time. I knew that he had pushed me away not for a lack of strong feeling but precisely because he was in love with me (every bit as much as I was with him) and it frightened him. (I can’t speak about younger generations, but this kind of thing was hardly uncommon among 20-somethings at that time.) To hear him articulate, voluntarily, the true things he couldn’t once say was both satisfying and poignant. And I of course had a few apologies to make in turn, so I did. Such dumb kids we were back then!
About 5 years ago we met for lunch in Greenwich Village, on the possibility that he, a lawyer-turned-producer, might want to hire me for a screenwriting project. The creative collaboration never panned out, nor did his stint in the movies overall. Turns out he had rushed into that business as a greenhorn, thinking his money and legal expertise would buy him a seat at the table. Instead, he got fleeced. At that meeting, I was reminded that although I’d once luuuuuuuved him, he no longer held the same draw for me. Youthful obsession having quit the scene ages ago, I now saw him from a calm distance. He was a dreamer—which I understood firsthand—but shockingly naive for a highly paid professional and married father in middle age. He also spoke about wanting to write books and screenplays, but in the exact manner that brilliant wannabes speak about leaping into something they haven’t actually tried yet. During this lunch, I often felt I was talking to someone two decades younger than me despite him being two years older.
Fast forward to December 2021, when we happen to find ourselves both single. After a year of occasional friendly check-ins that seemed more or less platonic, he suddenly confessed that he missed me and wanted to try again. Flattered and feeling a bit lonely during my first post-divorce holiday, I agreed.
In our last text conversation, where we started to make plans about getting together after Omicron had swept through, we were talking again about writing and he was getting, I thought, whiny about it. He was struggling, semi-blocked, having trouble finishing anything. He was trying to follow some suggestions made by his “brilliant entertainment lawyer friend” (read: NOT AN ACTUAL PRACTICING WRITER) to start with a specific historical-fiction project that should have been easy, he thought. I instantly recognized it as high-level creative work, not something a novice should tackle. He also spoke enviously about a multimillionaire novelist he knows who generates the Big Ideas but farms out the writing, the way a highly experienced TV show-runner might do.
I started to bristle. I was thinking: Ideas are NOTHING. Ideas are falling from the skies constantly like so much stardust. Brilliance and talent don’t count for much in the end, either. Work is what matters. Ceaseless, heartbreaking, occasionally rewarding writing and rewriting. Also, sacrifice, usually in the form of monetary security and loss of societal status, unless you achieve actual celebrity. That is the first cold shower any professional writer has to take if they plan to get any good.
If you’ve spent time in the art trenches and your back aches from digging, then listening to a wannabe is irksome. Still, I should have been more patient. I know his awful family history; I know how he ended up being the kind of not-quite-effectual person he is. The text conversation escalated. I suggested that he was trying to leap to the top without climbing the ladder—but I included some sarcastic, unkind words and thoughts that I’m too embarrassed to repeat here. A different man would have said, Hey, watch the snark! or That was uncalled for! I would have apologized and backed off; we would have laughed about it later. But this man, whom I know to be quite sensitive, called me cruel and kiboshed our reunion on the spot.
I had sabotaged it. I felt very ashamed for crossing a line from advice to impatience to mockery. I was also relieved. A mistake had been corrected, albeit in an unnecessarily hurtful fashion. Nostalgia and a bit of tender feeling are not the same as ongoing attraction, and Time—that asshole—moves in one direction only, at least here on earth. I was going to welcome this man back into my life already knowing I’d never love him again. The message from my obnoxious subconscious was: Stop pretending you want something 100% when it is more like 40% genuine interest and 60% adventurism. The healthier and more ethical choice would have been to turn him down gently, and right away. Instead, I’d enacted some kind of adolescent reunion/revenge fantasy. He hurt me terribly in 1991 and 1992; thirty years later I hurt him back. It was unintentional but that doesn’t feel like a good excuse.
Still dumb kids.
TEN. I do know myself, and I can’t alienate myself from her, even when she disappoints me. I’d like to develop what might be called indifference if that term didn’t have an edge of coldness. It’s not a cold heart I seek. I will never have a cold heart. Nope, mine remains red-hot much of the time, with a sometimes maladaptive (read: horribly fucking unhelpful) connection to my usually kind, sometimes very sharp tongue. I’ll never be an indifferent universe, but I’d like enough…inner vastness to remain nonreactive in the face of small things. To never slip and say something unkind. To be “in the moment” while being elsewhere, calmly watching the scene unfold instead of jumping into the drama. I want to remain unruffled when faced with romantic disappointment, family bickering at the holidays, organizational chaos at a new job, or a slight feeling of loneliness on a birthday spent in solitude. I want to swirl slowly around my own center, at a distance, exerting gravity without a sound.
ELEVEN. I imagine there’s a big 70s-style alarm clock whose metal number flaps have just turned over, or at least, the 2 and 0 and 2 are static but the 1 has flipped. Have I leaped out of bed full of energy and promise, or have I just rolled over and slammed on the snooze button? ONLY TIME WILL TELL.
TWELVE. There’s only now, says many an earthbound guru. There’s never any now, says the universe. Nyah nyah nyah nyah nyah. Everything is already in the past by the time you notice it happening. Wish upon a star? You’re wishing upon the light from a star that imploded, supernova’d, or fizzled out (I think that’s the technical term) billions of years ago. Sure, why not, make your wish, but it’s like trying to talk at the actors on the big screen. Don’t open that door! is what we scream at Michael Myer’s imminent victim. But it’s too late already! The deed has been done! There is only woulda coulda shoulda and a whole lotta blood.
THIRTEEN. If you think this piece of writing could have used more time to come together into a coherent statement or logical argument, you are right, but also wrong! It needed more time. There was no time! This is just what happened. March on ahead. Boldly go! Maybe we’ll catch up to you, or you’ll catch up to us, or something like that.
FOURTEEN. “Open the pod bay doors, HAL.” “I’m sorry Dave, I’m afraid I can’t do that.”
FIFTEEN. I wish you a happy whatever this season is! I hope an arbitrary period we’ll call 2022 brings you more of the things you need and fewer of the things you could do without. Here’s to another trip around the sun, always and forever 8 minutes late.
Fifteen ways of looking at a blackboard.
Number ten is me. I too want to be present and engaged without being overly reactive. Too much muchness and then I withdraw or drop out. Aiming to observe, describe, keep a level head. Maybe even... help.
Thanks again Sandhya, for the strong analysis and invigorating thoughts.
Another compelling missive . . . Keep 'em coming.