Finity

Life is a plane, a train, a zooming of a carriage from one point to the next. I'm in it, I'm sitting still or maybe I'm standing against the wall or maybe jumping up and down, maybe I'm banging on the door to be let out. Sometimes I resent having each stop pre-defined for me; and that the motion is linear, inevitable.

Forever is hypothetical. Time is counted out like coins: half an hour before I need to check out; an hour to get to the train station; thirty minutes' buffer before the train leaves 17 minutes past the hour; almost three hours exactly until I'm where I'm headed; I'll be able to have a hot bath, watch some TV, check my email in an hour and a half. Yearning for that, or yearning to be home, or yearning for a different context, or waiting around until the alarm goes off and I need to start counting out the minutes again.

That's why I used to miss my flights. I flipped my finger and wanted to just be in a place, just be, for a moment longer and not have to worry about things that tend to sort themselves out. I believed in just-in-time manufacturing. In my charmed existence, cabs miraculously got me wherever in the nick of it, concerts started late, people forgave me, coincidences happened fortuitously, the kindness of strangers was dependable. Sure, I'd curse and scream when, on the odd occasion, things didn't work out. Like that time heading toward Seoul, or worse, that time coming back from Paris. Fifteen minutes, even five, were the difference between now and another 12 hours, between life and its opposite, between movement and stasis.

My mom lives in what we fondly refer to as her own time zone. Which is half an hour earlier than the rest of the world, whichever way you spin it. She'll be at the airport unfailingly ahead by three hours. Is it something about getting older, I wonder. You come to the inescapable age to put away childish things-- like subjective approaches to clock-watching.

I was doing so well on this trip I was on. To there and after there. Five train rides, responsibly early each time almost. Almost. But my resolve was all but depleted at the end. I nearly missed the last one for no good reason, really. Just as likely, in an alternate universe, I was still pottering around and packing while my oblivious mode of transportation dutifully arrived, waited with a respectful pause, and chugged forward just as indifferently as it came.

"And the years shall run like rabbits" What comes to mind suddenly is Ethan Hawke intoning the poem, imitating a recording of Dylan Thomas reading W.H. Auden's "As I Walked Out One Evening". And J. Alfred Prufrock, measuring out his life with coffee spoons. Me, I tally the March twenty-sevens.

I'm turning thirty-one next week. Come buy me a drink.




But all the clocks in the city
Began to whirr and chime:
O let not Time deceive you,
You cannot conquer Time...
In headaches and in worry
Vaguely life leaks away,
And Time will have his fancy
To-morrow or to-day.