The slip that brought me, to my knees failed

[winterkoninkje]

I came to a realization earlier this week as falling asleep to folk songs from years back. Songs with enough memory to recall years gone by, but not so many as to evoke the years unbidden. Simon and Garfunkle, David Wilcox. And now old ska is playing, and Social D, to the same effect. The realization: I've been operating in crisis mode, for the last few weeks at least, how much longer than that I cannot say.

The first sign of this, no, not the first— The first sign I acknowledged is that time's been slipping. I've often joked: Time and I have never been close friends. The joke, ha ha, only serious. I've always been strangely estranged from temporality, and even now we've come only to an unspoken agreement, generally respected. My first memory is at twelve years old, CTY, Carlisle. Or maybe it was thirteen, I've never kept track of my age. We were looking at a map, me and a couple dormies, trying desperately to find ourselves on the map so we could figure out how to make it from there to the HUB, the building — it turns out — to our backs. I have a few shreds and scraps of memories that happened before then, but those came later. Memory, as with so many things, began at CTY.

The fact that the first twelve years are unremembered should explain a lot about me and Time. I, for any value of "I" worth discussing, have been conscious only for as long as those half my chronological age, and yet I've been told time and again I have wisdom and experience beyond what even the chronology would suggest. When people speak of gradeschool or the beginning of middleschool, or speak of being six or eight or ten, these things have no counterpart in my experience. Digging deeply enough there are vague shadows if I'm lucky, yet such shadows are but flickering figments. To be six years old is the same as being ten, as being two. I could not even say which preceded which, were not for external records, presuming there's enough substance for the specter to have been documented by another. And still I have no guarantees that such wraiths are actual memory and not those external documents reconstructed in my own mind.

After that first memory there are still gaps hither and yon. Small gaps. I could attribute these to the usual fragmentary memory of early childhood, though mine a decade later than the norm, but I know better; there are reasons the first twelve were forgotten and they don't just go away because one has discovered friends in distant states. In addition to these small gaps there are also spans of intensified time. I did a lot of drawing in my youth, a habit I'd like to regain. And into these drawings I would pour the most distilled concentration, frenzied activity, and in those spans time would slow to a mere crawl.

It wasn't until 8th grade that I was presented with the notion that time was a linear entity, that others did not experience skips and jumps, that others could not expand it or stop it with enough concentration. It was still a year or two after that until I could grasp that an "hour" was a fixed duration for measuring this linear time, and that everyone else knew this unit and could effortlessly describe events in portions and multiples thereof. And so I set out to wrest that durational demon; I would learn how to use this term as others use it.

And in enough, er, time did I manage to learn that arcane art. Learn well enough to pass in this strange world I find myself embedded, enough to stop turning heads. And yet, perhaps I learned to blend too well. Heads turn swift to snap when learned skills falter, questions asked, incredulity, questions prying, prying. But even with the skills intact there are times when it's brought up— the casual request for one's chronological age, as if such a thing were of any importance; or worse, for this cannot so easily be dismissed with some quick math, requests to temporalize some event, was it two years ago or ten? 1994 or 1996? And even with all those years remembered, it is not a thing that I have ever thought to file under such terms, never considered to be the axes of my life.

There is a time, to be certain, but it is a time of reference, of what grade it was in school or college, the year I took off, the year after graduating. These are the time that threads memories together, and yet, at some fundamental level, a level without external reference without the definitions that seniority succeeds juniority and so forth, a level that may not let one connect the chronologies of schooling and, say, volunteerism into a nice and single line— though there is a time of sorts, it is this level at which it operates, a level half outside of reason where numbers are as meaningless as they are to colors or the sweetness of a pear or first kiss.

But time slips. A lax and lazy god, oft distracted, who falls sleeping at post and lets fall from hands the tethers with which we tie our lives. And so too of late have I. I'm not entirely sure what would cause this. There's been some stress, true, over the last month or two: the moving expedition from hell, finding out PSU reneged on giving me money, my glorious kitty having run off to who knows where, larger creditcard bills than anticipated from moving expenses et al., and little things, the small and persistent, classes and their ilk, and too of course romances which bring with them always stresses to balance out the joys. So stresses, yes, but none extraordinary. None so strong as to break years of training, unless it wants breaking. And the part of me that wants to crawl into some hole until it all goes away would seem to belie the want of breaking. But in solitude time flows ever more in whorls and eddies, waters quick and dead. And even the part that would like to crawl away would not care to climb out of the faerie hill to find the world decades on decades older and all of memories forgotten.

So for all who've had to deal with me of late, I do apologize. I am certain I've made the worst of company, it's not my intention. But it's difficult to keep such things in mind when the record sk kips.