Looking back, I realized that my writing style can be defined as slacking off because I’ve written the amazing amount of approximately 1 (one. ONE!) article every 5 months. Kinda depressing. I mean, definitely not as much as the year-long global pandemic but up there somewhere, on my list at least. I do like the optimism that we’re still calling this year’s Olympics “Tokyo 2020” though, and I do think the same level of denial should be applied to all our pandemic birthdays.
Somewhere in between the blurry days of lockdowns, handwashing, and mask-wearing, a whole damn year seems to have managed to slip between my fingers like the fine sand on those beaches I have been longing for. It appears almost as if someone got the remote control of my life and pressed the fast-forward button a few times, probably in an attempt to fix things but only making them worse (put like this, it does sound like something of my doing actually).
I still live on airport time, wear the same fluffy purple flannel bathrobe (FYI I’ve washed it), and actively refuse to work on the next Silicone Valley unicorn business idea. Life B.C. has now melted into a camping story to tell the descendants while roasting marshmallows by the fire, and dating has become even more confusing despite my firm convictions that it couldn’t get any messier.
We’ve all been royally screwed up sometime, somehow, somewhere. Most of us carry a rucksack full of memorabilia and emotional damage that we neatly pack back every time it decides to break open and spill out in front of others. Even though most of the heart-breaking mementoes are overlapping across time, space and cultures, each is unfortunate in its own way. Except for one, which is universal. Timing.
You come back and they go. You head South and they do West. Chances are, it’s gonna take a while before you arrive at the same destination. If ever. And even then, one will be busy healing the emotional scars South inflicted, and the relationship status of the other with West will be “it’s complicated”.
Lately, as evident, I’ve been thinking about timing a lot. Somehow, its fast current made me more aware of its passing, and the fact that my mom made me go through all the boxes of my childhood starting at age 5 brought about the aura of all things passed. Tickets for events I’ve arrived late to, pictures of friends I’ve lost all contact with, handwritten notes by people I’ve missed.
I use me some Trello boards for everything. I keep a schedule. I budget. And I’d like to be able to organize all of those keepsakes into an Excel spreadsheet and apply formulas to calculate their impact on my life through time. Sadly, the reality is such that I only have my flawed memory, a messy timeline, and the logic of The Butterfly Effect to try to find connections where there are probably none.
Still, I cannot help but wonder, is life just a series of random occurrences? Or is every second of our lives controlled by fate? If I wasn’t perpetually 15 minutes late, would my life be totally different? Would I never run into some people? Would there ever be a good time to lose someone? Is timing everything?
One fact I’ve learned the hard way is that we have no direct control over… well anything really. Bad things happen to good people undeservingly, unforeseen events shake up control freaks regardless of the level of effort put into our meticulously organized agendas. The wildest dreams come true for some people, and conventional plans never see the light of day for others.
If you’ve ever seen Sliding Doors, the only point at which Gwyneth Paltrow has ever been a relatable human being, you’ll understand the verbatim meaning of ‘a missed train’ and my profound desire to check in with all my parallel selves and see those near-misses and almost-was and what-ifs and where they would have taken me. Instead, as a consolation prize, I only get the confirmation that sliding doors prove that we cannot control anything but our reaction to things as they just occur. So how do you go about when you are face-to-face with one and you know it?
Living through what seems like a time-lapse of my life, I feel like I’ve been standing on the platform at Limbo Central with my heart and soul packed in my suitcase waiting for the Ever-After Fucking Express to roll in and tell me that my ticket is still valid and that I may reboard the train. Only the station announcer keeps coming on and telling me that my train has been delayed as the driver has suffered a major panic attack in Indecision City, “We suggest you take the bus”. Do I wait? How will the bus ride unravel in the future? And what if my train finally arrives the minute I walk up the stairs and out of the station? Bad timing again?
And if only the single incidence of being in the right time at the right place was all that was necessary for things to work out. Attraction and connection are certainly reasons without which we shouldn’t even consider starting something. And we’ve all gone out with someone that had left us clueless as to what the fuck was going on because they had the communication skills of a newborn. So, when there is so much to align already, is inconvenient timing the one reason to run away at the speed of light, or should you wait before throwing in the towel just yet? If timing is not as important as we think, then which factors take precedence?
Sometimes the past catches up way too fast, and the future takes way too long. But I do like to believe that, at the end of the day, the decision to slow down or pick up your pace is a personal one to make. It may be somewhat predetermined by the rucksack you have on your back and how long you’ve been stuck carrying it around, but nothing but yourself is stopping you from leaving it behind, where it belongs. In the past. Your move.
I carefully unpacked my boxes, throwing away a lot of rubbish that no longer serves me. Set aside only 2 cases of things to keep as a gentle reminder of all the time passed between now and the first scribbled poem about heartbreak on the back of an English notebook. I carefully placed them at the highest shelf (with the help of a ladder), and neatly placed the old rucksack on top. I couldn’t find a lot of connections, and most things didn’t make sense, but this did.
So, I hope you do have faith in the odd ebb and flow of time, and may the odds ever be in your favour.
Thanks for reading ✌️
