Time: A Brief Manifesto
My lover and I fight about time.
We fight about how much time we spend and don’t spend together. We fight when one of us (me) thinks we’ve squandered it.
I say “lover,” but we’ve been through the ceremony. Before the wedding (a timeless tradition), I waited in a dress blank as a page, mouth straight as a timeline, while the hour we’d agreed to begin came and went. We shaved thirty minutes off Forever, then, in the vows, we called each other “lover.”
Every dream I’ve ever had includes time. Dream Me is also anxious about time. Specific times. There are clocks in these dreams, schedules exchanged. Someone is late. Going to be late. We won’t make it—the train, the meeting. Something important is lost.
My lover and I fight about time but only I dream about it. That means I care more. What else could it mean?
In American Sign Language to denote a person who does or is something—teacher, writer, lover—an agent marker is used after the verb. It is signed by holding both hands flat, palms facing each other perpendicular to the floor about body width apart. The hands move down a few inches simultaneously in one short, strong motion.
Teach + person = teacher.
Write + person = writer.
Love + person = lover.
The space between the hands holds firm, like bookends—a beginning and ending. Like showing how much time we have together. Not much. The width of a window sash. The length of a loaf of bread.
Even as my body widens over time, this new sign doesn’t mark enough time. I want a different measure, a different clock, the clock of trees, but not just any trees, redwoods, their trunks so wide I cannot reach to slice down on each side with my knife hands—treeperson. They are too wide to put my arms around. I’ve tried.
When my lover arrives home late, I do not put my arms around him. This is irony. I am angry: an emotion for which we do not have time. Tick, tick, tick, goes Forever.
In Ireland, where I live with my lover, there are regions where the trees are much older than their size would suggest because the ground is so rocky they grow only slowly, taking their time.
Usually, one lover runs out of time before the other lover, though, it can happen that they run out at the same time—driver and passenger in a car veering toward a tree the size of a redwood. As my lover and I skid off the road, the redwood headed for the windshield, I will shout, “I was right!” just like you’re not supposed to. Would you rather be right, or would you rather be happy? they always want to know. I would rather have more time.
There are people from my life who have already run out of time, cut down like trees through disease before their time. So many people. So little time. Sometimes I even think my obsession over time might be rooted in this fact. Clearly, it should not be so that these people have gone missing. The place where they used to stand, empty forever; the time they’ve been absent, endless. Counting towards Forever starts again when you’re gone, you see, and that’s not the kind of time I’m looking for. Those people on the other side of Forever should still be here, should stand straight and strong as trees or agent markers, not in the woods, not along the highway, but right here, right in front of me, where I can put my arms around them.
