I Hate Time

...and it hates me. I'm 36 in a senseless stream, and that's fine with me. I like feeling lost in time, so that the now surprises me, and the past, too. Like an old person, the streams of present and past woosh and recede, woosh and recede. I was only 11 the other day, racing with the boys through the woods to spy on the older girls and boys beginning the awkward mating rituals of 12. And just the other day I walked down Park Avenue, having taken the train back from Bronxville for class; I was in my twenties.

"There is no loneliness like theirs, wrote James Wright in "A Blessing," as if it was a good thing. Walks in Ocean Grove towards the water, was that yesterday? This morning? It was usually cold, the wind funneling the breezes up the wide street off-season. My roommate, Andrew, said, "When I was deciding where to live, I knew I needed to be able to walk to someplace beautiful." In my whole life, I have never come across any other idea that made more sense than that.

In this time and in this town, I write and find flow like Wright's blessing. And loneliness. It's my truth, and it can be crazy-making, but in this world, really, what is better than crazy?

So thank you James Wright. For that poem with the two shy horses and the feeling at the end that you are about to break into blossom. Because it's just that: breaking and blossoming together. A kind of painful truth: that time continues unabated and loneliness is hard to defend and the memory of walks are always more delicious than walks today.

***

In our family, people need to get places on time, though, and that is a different way to be. Things need to be delivered places on time. I do my best. I take the fall. I get angry. I withdraw. I take time. I try to emerge with a different sense of how to be in this life without feeling completely trapped by time. In the past, there was joy in movement, but the rushing, rushing. It's nothing. It's squall.