Timeknots
Some weeks, some days, feel like moments of your life have been plucked from the drawer and thrown into the tumbler to tell you more. You don’t always know what the More is, but you know you need to look. To notice a shift, a change, from all you’ve been to all that came to now…
The sky is black enough to see the Milky Way I haven’t seen since moving from this place two years ago. Two years is no longer long, but now every two years feels like a lifetime ago. Or maybe three. Not in length of time, but in who I remember being and who I think I am now.
Returning to locations you once lived, seeing people you once knew, has the strangest effect on seeing the Now you. Everything familiar, but nothing the same, as even the eyes with which you now see have changed.
We’ve come to town for a day to move a new renter in, arriving during the 100 km race that my partner once did. Something that used to feel solid and like an event, a going-on, now just head lamps bobbing in the dark down the street and up the mountainside. Looking at them now, I wonder what all this is for.
In the morning, we go to Auchan for cleaning supplies. Stepping over the threshold of this unremarkable, yet inexplicably terrible, store is like another time warp. We’re only here for a day, but I suddenly remember the caged-animal feeling I used to have when this is where I did my shopping— with no clear end in sight. I look around and have compassion for those times I thought maybe I was just bad at making a life for myself or seeing the positive, because looking at all these people… this is just not my place. The first time I went to this store, about two weeks after we’d arrived, I looked around at every single person in all the lines, wondering, with genuine concern, if there was something in the town’s water and if it was safe to drink.
On the other side of checkout, in the farthest line, I see the man with Adam Driver vibes. The one I could always tell something was off about. If someone had shown me a photo of him and asked where I knew him from, I’d be able to picture him walking, face always serious, but it might not have seemed accurate to say I knew him from here. From this chapter. Seeing him now, and the way he still stands out, makes me feel like I’m tapping on an answer without knowing what the question is. I watch all this with the feeling that there’s no possibility of this life having been mine, regardless of whoever I was struggling to be back then.
In the afternoon, desperately needing chips or nuts or something to get me through the angst of evening, I remember there’s still nothing open on a Sunday, just like when I lived here… and desperately needed something like a bag of chips to get through the evening. Driving by the place we lived for five years, the streets we walked, thinking of the people I hung around with, it all feels like a dream you have where things are happening, but when you wake nothing makes much sense. To feel that this is how you see five years of your life is unsettling.
The renter has come to town to do the exact job I did here for two years, and I’m suddenly back there pushing needle through leather, trying not to stare too much as Brigitte yells, j’en ai marre ! in response to absolutely nothing around her. I try imagining who I’d be in an existence in which I’d stayed there, doing the same thing all this time. Not that professionally I’ve done anything so grand since, but I’m aware of all I’ve moved through just by having left. That was always the issue with “employment”. After about two years when it became clear that this was it—you were essentially looking at what the place had to offer you forever—being there began to feel like an impossibility eating away at your potential the same way it chewed through massive amounts of your time. No clear purpose in sight.
I stop at a friend’s house, picking up where we left off, sneaking in a glass of wine on an empty stomach before the long ride back. I realize where we left off was not one point in time but many, as there were meetings and conversations sometimes broken up by years in between. She is pregnant now and visibly, though quietly, displeased about it. I want to be able to talk to her about it, but this meeting will remain in my archives of her as the time she was traveling with her in-laws and couldn’t really say what she needed to, much less be herself. My roster of our meetings weave in and out, confusing what-happened-when in the loose weaving of our lives.
On the way out of town we stop at the bakery where I worked for six months—that familiarity of an environment you worked in and the accompanying emotional charge completely gone. I’m barely able to imagine myself behind the counter, helping the endless customers who never seemed to brush, much less wash, their hair after getting up each day, as they order their baguettes—but no, not that one, one that’s cooked more. The way the manager blatantly sexually harassed me—which I didn’t love—but as he was the only one there with much in the way of a brain, I put up with it for the half-decent distracting conversation he managed in my language.
The speeding headlights follow the curve down the hill. Four pigs appear out of the darkness—solid boars standing still in a perfect line across our lane. We swerve, missing the leader’s nose by inches where she’s paused for information in the dark. I recover for a second, if recovery means adrenaline plummeting quickly into heavy fatigue in all my limbs. I’m transported back to this same plateau years before, watching a mother and her four boar piglets trot across the road and out of the way just in time. We were on our way back to this place I didn’t want to be living, and the sighting had been a gift in the dark. Magic still to be found.
A shooting star rides low across the horizon, golden and trailing like Hollywood or those public service announcements for kids—The More You Know. Flash to the first time I saw a star like this with this driver who has been the entire reason for all these experiences that are today rattling around in my mind. I don’t land on that memory long, just that in the romance of the moment I couldn’t even point the star out to him because the day had already been some strange fantastical adventure-romance cliché.
On the radio, the Pope condemns the actions of Israel and the latest updates on Lebanese tribulations. His words in Italian make sense to me. I don’t speak Italian, but we just spent a week there, so everything Italian makes more sense than my own life right now—not just their words. And then I’m off again, back in my grandfather’s kitchen, eating lunch, or was it dinner—probably something I only liked parts of, like the spaghetti but not the hamburger once I’d already eaten all the salty browned exterior off. The little white TV in the corner saying words like Lebanon, Israel, then Bosnia, Kosovo. Why did we care so much about these far away places and why were they always shooting dust explosions at each other and giving people nowhere to go? I didn’t really know who Yasser Arafat was, but I knew what he looked like because they always showed the man with the black-and-white thing on his head when they said his name. I wasn’t convinced his drab green coat jived with the aesthetic of whatever was going on on his head. Thirty years later, I watch the dark road and watch my tiny self back then as she wished something better was playing on the TV, and wonder if we’ve just looped back around on the circular track—one that’s larger than the one I just rode with the pigs crossing the road. Is it a cycle completion? A revisitation? Or just humans rolling around in the spin cycle without much cleansing happening? Milling around with trendier missiles but the same stupid humanity.
Sometimes there are portals through which we weave from moment to moment without much reprieve. Taken like the willing hostages that sit to be locked into theme-park rides, we slide along a track of the randomly ordered happenings of our lives with unclear levels of significance, wondering why they’re so vivid and what they have to do with Now. Sometimes at the other end we come out with new clarity. We are a new person for having experienced the ride. Other times, we have to wonder: what was all that about? Assume you saw what you needed to.