Tomorrow feels like a Monday. It's a today's the weekend vibe, except it's not, and the more I think back on it, my day, the more I remember. Middle-of-the-week traffic. Noise, endless, up my ear canal, inside my ribcage. Noisy, busy, 9-to-5 city, except with every year that passes, I feel like I belong in it less and less. There was once a time when I felt connected. Firmly following the days and occurrences, the rhythm of la vie cotidienne.
Of late, my mind wanders.
I mix up the days. I have no reason to remember days. The only ones I've got to account to at the moment are my characters. And they don't ask me to set an alarm clock, or why I slept late. They don't know whether it's Friday or Tuesday, night, or dawn, whether the street's busy or has been deserted for six hours. And there's a certain comfort to it all, a sense of freedom. I like being able to do nothing in the middle of a Wednesday. To be at the movies, to go out for coffee.
When someone says to me "after work" I sort of just... drift. Lose interest. I'm understanding less and less why we trap ourselves, why people don't have better lives. Why after work needs to be after dark, when the day's almost over and it's cold and gloomy outside. Why can't you live when you want to live?
I wish I could be upset about it sometimes. Wish I could rally the troops, muster the energy to set the clock, or keep track of the days, except it's always a whim, in passing, never stays long enough for me to figure out the damn things. I set the time on my Kindle in Spain and realized it had stayed an hour early than the time here, and set it correctly. Then I thought, why?
Who actually cares if it's 10 or 11? Monday or Thursday? Obviously, there are little markers to abide by. Dates set. Encounters, coffees to grab, movies to catch, events to attend. And they all needs must function along the set time that we all (seemingly) respect and follow. I, too, have learned how to follow those more or less accurately.
But they're not always. I'm not always tied to the real world, and the more I drift away, the flimsier my binds are becoming. I just finished writing a story that might be a book sometime, and about halfway through I thought well that's just me really, isn't it? And now, looking back, I see this sense of atemporality, this disbelonging, and what a big part of the plot it is. Only, in my story, it ends up creating quite a bit of trouble for my characters. You can only live outside of time for so long before someone else accuses you of wasting theirs, or you simply start living at different rates.
And how long can you hold on then?
I wish it worried me more. I wish I cared what day it is today, and if I've got something important for it, I typically do, but mostly days are just becoming a sort of blur. An exciting, peculiar blur, one that doesn't feel like it belongs to this differently peculiar reality that most people seem to be inhabiting.
I've never been too skilled at that. Blending in. Belonging. It used to bother me. Last week.
Wes & Grindan
