Our long conversation with the stars forces the continuum of time into simplified terms. Time is packed up in phrases and sold as Quantum Physics for Dummies, which now lies on the carpet beside a cup of cinnamon tea that once was rainwater, bark, fungus, and leaves.
I embark on a Friday. A new virus beats at the door of humanity’s fragile nerves. Planes rise up and fall down, delivering their cargo with a thud of rubber, heating sleet-strewn tarmacs —we still do not fully understand how. Someone once whispered into my ear the laws that govern my motion, but I was distracted by my pre-birth view of the stars. Babies are born with wisdom, according to some psychologists in California; newborns gaze up blurry-eyed into the face of a caregiver who is older, wizened, yet less wise—they are fresh from a place that looks down on time and up toward memories.
Rain guides the eye towards the earth, memories dissipate with the molecules finding their way down through the soil. Drops of rain were once snowflakes, carrying at their center microscopic gifts for the earth below, bacteria, minerals—seeds, genes, life. Genes that thread their way through time, the ever growing library of evolution, of memory. Temporal, scattered, frail—gravity, warmth, and earth perpetuate the hydrologic cycle of the drop. It is shattered and forgotten, drunk and released, worn, cried, mixed, evaporated. Memories broken down to their most base elements.
The loose ringlets of time coax me to think spatially, as though things disbanded by time and distance could ever synchronize. Space denies certainty. People are divorced from places the way memory becomes divorced from time. The I-am-coming, I-am-going vulnerability of a plane journey becomes our human relationship to memory. Thoughts become manifest, dreams become truth, and we search for the elusive visions planted in the hippocampus. Jet bridges smell of dog treats and Mentos, people mumble, conversations between seat-mates grow familial in their brief and public ways. We are all here for a moment—enough for the force of our presence to act on distant objects—long enough to be absorbed by the gravitational pull of memories suppressed, re-addressed, forgotten, and far above.
No Comments