Time Passages

 

Much of the disorientation that plagues my path is the lack of a cohesive, consistent feel to the passage of time. The older I get, the less granular the ability to measure the distance between seconds and days and years and decades becomes so of-the-moment of landmarks existing both in starkness and varying shades of fade.

Lying in bed, trying not be arise and start my Monday, glances at the clock which has only occupied 4 minutes felt like an hour of trying to shut out the sunlight behind clenched eyes and always wandering thoughts.

I was curious to research through my emails to figure out how long it had been since I last saw my primary care doctor, dentist, or even my eye doctor. Because I am organized, even if linearly discombobulated, it wasn’t difficult to realize it’s been since 08/15/2012 and 08/21/2012 for all those things. So I sent myself an email at work from myself at home to remember to schedule those things because for an old man, that’s far too long between health check-ups.

And in my head generally I knew I needed to schedule these things, but had a reminder, so wasn’t too worried. After all, seems like that was just a few weeks ago. However, when I glanced today at that self-sent reminder, it wasn’t in the last month or so. Fuck, I’d sent that to myself back on 12/16/2017…..somehow 8 fucking months has flown by since I realized from my research that 5 fucking years had flown by.

More importantly, meaning what I tend to think about moreso, is the stairstep of orientation that must be occurring for others relative to years fluttering. For instance, I first joined LiveJournal as my real/family-based original account on 05/14/2000. My second journal, Pather, intended more as a diary, away from those I knew in my daily life, was created 10/18/2000 and shortly thereafter the online “friends” I interacted with persons quite younger than myself, persons born nearer my highschool graduation year than the neighborhood of my own 1962, folks in the early stages of 20’ish who in varying moments were unhappy, betrayed, intrigued, beguiled or tickled to learn that a 38-year-old man would need find souls who might interconnect in the randomness of the internet.

I suppose to beautiful women in their early-to-mid-20s, I must have (and likely still) seem like the online version of the creepy old man at the club. Like what the fuck is he doing hanging around here?

Thing is, there are now human beings old enough to vote who had not been birthed when I started my weirdness of existence online. Imagine that. So, well, many of those women I adored (and a couple of whom I truly loved) are now migrating to my then age.

One such woman, a wondrous writer who is now married and last I knew teaching English at college, and who has now migrated to Tumblr and no longer appears active in LJ, posted a lovely in-the-moment candid photo of herself, wondering how she was suddenly 34 years old.

My adorations, the sureness of Jayme and the sadness of Heather, both born in 1980, quite literally will each turn 38 during this November, essentially my own age when I found my tangent real life did not contain persons with whom I needed find an inherent connection, or at least no interactions and conversations where one could truly express the honesty of one’s core (even if initially behind a mask of falseness, or perhaps simply my often-ahead-of-the-curve creation as a catfisher).

Mostly I wonder if now that time has run fleeting beneath their own paths, if now that they are at similar aged moments of self-clarity within this larger uncontrollable world, if they might consider with greater empathy the person that I was, and really moreso if they’ve come to realize I was always myself, that those intertwining conversations and shared brain waves, contained the same trueness of me as much as it did themselves, that we are within ourselves the constant of our each “me”, and that these puzzle-pieces of us would meld just as cohesively, even if our edges have frayed and worn.

 

In fact, maybe the reality is we’d fit even more adeptly, smooth as the waves of life have flowed frictionful across our varied wanders.