through time and seasons

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This piece is lifted directly from my journal. I suppose I have done a fine job polishing it to make it fit for reading, but if I haven’t then I expect you might find it to be a little long-winded. I hope you are all doing well?

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René Magritte. The Banquet (1958).

It has become routine for me to start counting down to my birthday from May when my best friends turn one year older than me and start to rub it in. May, June, then July. I have a love-hate relationship with routines: I love them because I don’t do well with spontaneity. I hate them because I don’t do well with sudden change. But not this one. This is the only routine I love. 

Also, because it has remained unchanged since 2009.

More recently, I have been attempting to find some rhythm in my life – some of it has come from having some semblance of a routine, albeit never truly. Despite occasionally falling out of balance, the little oscillating patterns have been somewhat steady. For the most part, my days have the exact pace and the same motions.

2009 feels like a lifetime ago, and so much has changed since. I had just started University when I met my best friend. I thought she was cute and funny at first, but when she said “I’m older than you by 19 days” I knew I was never going to let her go. It’s been such a long time since that interaction and I don’t remember most of it.

In recent conversations with friends, time has been a consistently recurring theme. Every day, something changes around us. “Where do you see yourself in five years?” one person asked, barely getting the words out amid a row of laughter.

But time is a gift, however you choose to look at it. Some gifts are good, some gifts you don’t quite fancy, but a gift is a gift. The thing about this gift though, is, it is best shared with an audience. Some people will leave before the end of the show, some people will stay through the dullest, most hard to watch parts of it, and some will stay for the encore.

‘Again!’ 

I love an audience. There is something to having witnesses to the journey of your life. (I perform better when tasks are written down; my notepad serving as my audience and a witness). As time passes and your own memory starts to fail, you can always count on your witness to recount that journey – truthfully or garnished, it hardly matters. No matter how many seasons you live through and now many things change around you, your audience lives to testify, to bear witness.

I never make it through the cold seasons without being incapacitated for at least a day. A combination of antihistamines and whiskey forcing me to stay in bed, drowsy and unable to function. I do believe I had my first drink as an adolescent, I don’t remember when exactly; but I vividly remember my first glass of whiskey as an adult. It was a warm July evening, and there was a boy – there’s always a boy – watching me closely while I try to play it cool, trying to prove that I was tough. I was now grown.

It was not so much about impressing a boy like it was about trying to find some form of validation, to reassure myself  that I could handle anything. I had just moved away from home, for the first time in my life,  and I knew that I needed to become untethered from everything that I knew to become the person I needed to be in order to make it through this new season of my life. Much like the cuttlefish, this was my camouflage, my angle for moving from outsider to insider. I don’t remember how much I drank that day, but I know that in more ways than one, over half a decade ago, that night changed me.

I hate routines because when there is a quick, unplanned change, it’s hard to refocus. However, change in itself is not all bad. With a potential for good and bad, and the ability to move both quickly and slowly, change is how you move from one season of your life to another. Now, I have a love-hate relationship with change. I like it better when it’s slow.

I like a slow burn in every possible context. I myself am a witness. I like to watch the sun rise in the winter, and I like to wait for it to set in the summer. I like to watch a colony of ants transport crumbs. Slowly and steadily. Like a candle whose flame captures your attention and holds it, flickering through the wind, undecided about dying out just yet. I like the kind of change you can live through. The kind of change that happens in small, reasonably paced frequencies, patiently waiting for you to take in all of it.  The kind that allows you to take a moment to rip off multiple pages from your story and re-write or burn them altogether. The kind that gives you time to grow with every choice, every mistake, every tear drop, every loss, every win, every stomach churn and every motion sickness. Where you can raise your head, splash some water on your face and continue your journey. Mistakes are punished, but like a hangover, the punishment is swift yet merciful.

I no longer fear a hangover. The journey between my first sip of whiskey, and my second first sip, and the sip I had today has been incredible. My audience has been pleasant and pleasantly entertained. So, when my friends ask me where I see myself in five years, I never have an answer,  not because I do not occasionally have a day dream wherein I play out my life a few years ahead, but because I know the answer which they seek from me, and I do not have it.

But, the thing that I love the most about slow change is neither its benevolence nor its mercifulness, it's the knowledge that there is no finality. Don’t get me wrong, I hate when time seems to be unending, especially when you are suffering. There is no fun in watching your misery drag out excruciatingly – and I know this because I have woken up from a surgery in the middle of stitching just as the anaesthesia began to wear off. When I opened my eyes the second time after what seemed like an eternity, my boyfriend was seated at the edge of my bed reading a book.

I haven’t spoken to or seen him in a few years. It was an excruciating process which took another eternity,  but I served out my sentence and went through all the stages of grief. I occasionally think about him, but like some distant memory, a dream sometimes. I don’t think that I remember what he looks or sounds like anymore, save for the bare silhouettes of him that form in my head. But, that is the beauty of slow change, you can just always carry on. And time is the wheel that carries you forward.