I'm here

This year is almost over, and while I am making “something” of it by going abroad, I wonder what exactly happened. Where was I? Fragments of a past and maybe it all split in a way you can’t put it back together.

I wonder how differently we process time, you and I. Hours happen so quickly now. Who doesn’t remember those elementary days where months were seasons and seasons were years?

Whenever I talk to my father I feel the time differential. Vaguely I feel he is only aware during holidays; sometimes I wonder when the day will come and our Donnie Darko wormholes shall align and we could have an honest conversation, both fully present, both away from the temporal sink-holes. But I wouldn’t be sure what we’d have to say. I’m too old to be angry, however much I’d love to use the blueprint of the gruff and alcohol and silence for the annual visit. It seems reliable.

The phases between cities and jobs makes time accelerate so rapidly. The last slow rollings may be found walking my college apartments more than a decade ago, and I am surprised to see faces from middle school walking in tandem. For a few evenings. It happened, but I’m not sure if I was present about it. I can’t seem to figure out where they came, and the timeline gets all jumbled. How did we keep in touch, seeing as we went to different highschools? I wonder if they still have the same group chats; I was so painfully lonely seeing all the online statuses and an inability to do anything with it. What else other than deleting everything?

I guess part of the reason I don’t like talking is how it usually defaults into the slave-processes; the language leans implicitly toward some forgone conclusion we’re all seeking, whether goal-fulfillment or opinions and, sometimes, I’m reminded of my first senior software colleagues and how they’d tell me to “just Google it”. Just Google everything. Maybe the Internet deprecated conversing. AI as the finisher. I can never tell when someone is happy to talk to me; I keep thinking I ought to Google every asinine question and sought opinion.

Now I agree with them. Why not Google everything?

After we do all the research, confirm all the Right Choices and Paths, we can walk together in silence. I just want to share the silence.

I’ve been reading the second book in the Three Body Problem series. One section talks about imagining the perfect companion and trying to write about it. The crux comment is that we fall in love with the images people project, rather than the people themselves. If you get good enough, you can remove the sock puppet anchor another one makes for you. Build your doll in the sky. What seems pinned to reality floats into the imaginary, however real their face flickers across the fireplace. S’mores or just crackers?

If I was ten years younger I think reading this part would’ve upset me a lot. But I gave up on those romantic ideas: that you could peer into another soul.

But I am here, today, at least. Where are you? Even if I was barely present for the past decades, I am here. Will you? I’ll exist in this moment. Because that is all one can seem to do. Let’s grip Reality’s seatbelt and hope, before slipping past the next city, cities after, we can at least make out some of the scenery, some of the still moments. Boarding and departing.

Let’s learn to take these moments, perpetually. Perpetually and indefinitely.