Time

When you’re broken, time doesn’t exist like it used to. Sure it’s still there: you have a past, a present, and a future. They just aren’t always in that order. Sixty minutes doesn’t necessarily make up an hour; sometimes it’s a hundred minutes, sometimes it’s fifteen. When I’m in a particularly good mood time skips around and noon becomes night in the blink of an eye. Even my body moves faster, as though someone pushed the fast forward button on my life’s remote.

Most of the time however my body moves slowly like a frame by frame replay. My hour is days long. The worst part is knowing that when I look at my watch ten minutes from now, it will read as though only two minutes have gone by. I know it’s been longer than that, and yet all the clocks in my room tell me differently. I spend most of my day sleeping because at least when I wake up the clocks will give me a time later than when I closed my eyes. I do not have this luxury when I’m awake. I sit in the dining hall and watch people come and go, and yet my watch still tells me it’s been no time at all.

It’s times like these I start to suspect my clocks are conspiring against me. “Let’s not change every minute,” they say to each other. “Let’s try every six minutes instead.” Perhaps they too are tired of the suffering and sleep to alleviate the pain of being awake. Is life so unbearable that even my watch wants out?

Even the days of the week are out of order. Sunday comes before Thursday, which is followed by a combination of Monday and Wednesday. Sometimes Tuesday comes next, but mostly Saturday is shortened and mixed with Friday. Then maybe Sunday comes again after that, but it could be Wednesday afternoon or Thursday again. Sometimes Tuesday lasts longer than the rest of the week combined. The months get confusing too. January 20th happened two days after January 4th, but then the 29th didn’t arrive for three weeks.

Not that it matters what the date is. Today is no different from yesterday and will most likely be the same as tomorrow. And yet time seems so linear for everyone else. No one else seems to notice the 400 minutes in an hour, or the 72 hours in a day. Wednesday is always 24 hours long and is followed by and equally long Thursday. And Tuesday is never skipped. It makes me wonder if other people pretend it’s that way, or if I live in a parallel time zone that follows different rules. Maybe time is different for everyone. Time cannot be trusted.