Time, stumbling
What are you holding on to?
Time stumbled today. Dearly beloved, I went back to college and found the exact crevices of space that I used to occupy, the little bubbles of laughter that I left in the department walls still there and floating and making space for the new ones today. I hugged people tightly and kissed many cheeks. Curled up in a seat across a gorgeous face that looks like what rejuvenation feels like. Someone did necromancy on their desires and started chasing the animus that had gone on unpaid leave. Someone came in, saw me, eyes widened, and then much later, hugged me and said there’s no mass when you hug me no, just like one stick I am. Stick it to the man, someone told me long ago, the man doesn’t care about you and isn’t thinking about you so deeply either. Do what you want. Someone said your job can make you money-rich or time-rich, and you have to steal your me-time and do things that you enjoy and find interesting as much as you can. What are you doing in your me-time, I ask. Sleeping, they say.
No wonder we all are in each other’s orbits when we share the same gluey sticky pestilential obsession with compassion and pleasure and a divine hatred of ‘success’. There is a difference between success and competence. One can be tremendously successful because they are incompetent. Success comes with side dishes like efficiency and quality and productivity yadda yadda. It implies that there is a way to standardise human abilities and motivations, a way to mechanise imagination, a way to turn the sun into an LED lamp in bourgeois orange blossom hue. It underutilises erring, and undermines the value and sense in chaos. Plenty of things got done in college because they were done badly first, and then done better. And then the next year, they were better than that. Plenty of us were given chances when we were dying of self-deprecation and boredom and buckling at the joints and in the gullet. Plenty of us took them because screwing up was not treated as an indictment of personality or capability. It was okay if we weren’t great. Someone said today we all graduated together only no. Grades evaluated only a tiny bit of our lives. They spoke to each other vacuously. Hi bro, I’m a great CGPA score. I’m better, what will you do. Measure success like what, the strength of the sea? As if. You can only measure the strength of the wave rolling in. Then you look out at the sea and realise oh damn oh hell I’m in for it now.
It was okay if we weren’t great. It was okay if we weren’t great. It was okay if we weren’t great. We weren’t changing the world, just making it a little bit ours.
Someone brought sweets, dripping syrup over answer papers. The sunset was phenomenal. Time swerved. I was older but not and very strangely at ease but also shedding skin. The sofa felt the same. The people talked the same. I talked less, but still too much. I work less than I did in college but everything is different, and I grew new soles on my feet. Old college festival posters bring back a rush of nostalgia. I feel like an addict trying to quit and taking one last hit. Dearly beloved, I come back to college and find parts of me dead.
Bits of the personality gone, ecdysis of the second and third year me. New time, you know. A ripening mind. Everything looks identical except for some of the desks that are decorated differently by new people whom I have not met and grown accustomed to while loitering in the department. I’m stepping over territory that I’m not quite part of anymore, but I know all the shortcuts and the textures. All of this time is borrowed. It’s lucky that it’s a Saturday and there aren’t too many classes. I see angels and I see stickmen and I see sly winks and monster faces and quirked eyebrows that ask me what’s cooking, what’s bathing, what’s smelling. Goodbye unorganised desk, coffee stains are struck down by Savlon wipes. I talk about work and masters’ programmes and grin about responsibilities. Inside, a part of me is beaming out a message saying here is an adult, here is an adult.
In high school everyone pulls some tough gangsta act about not needing anyone. That’s because every teenager is scared that the world does not need them, but simultaneously thinks that the world must be deliberately constructed to focus on them only. Focus on their flaws, the yawning gaps of their ‘potential’, their futures, their little self-images that are only just sprouting. It’s scary to think about scrutiny like that, especially when you’ve already predetermined the judgements – and they are all negative. And so in high school everyone thinks that they don’t need other people in order to be themselves.
Fuck that noise, please, you need the world to make your world. It’s terribly easy to mistake isolation for independence. I thought adulthood meant independence, and I thought independence meant doing everything alone. I thought it meant not relying on anyone, and that taking responsibility was code for earning respect. Taking charge of one’s own life sounded glorious, so I waited for the tipping moment, the pistol shot, the pull back of the latch on the gates that allows a horse to gallop away. Absolutely not. There is no catalyst moment. There is a legal shift, yes, and that’s about it. Some days when you are an adult you feel like one, and some days you are definitely not one. Sometimes I think that being an adult means that responsibility is shared, respect mutual, and decisions collaborative. Sometimes I think it’s me telling everyone to back off, I know what I’m doing, let me handle it. Sometimes it’s me asking for help, not knowing how it is perceived but knowing who is in my corner. Sometimes it is me stitching together what I know of other people and what they know of me, and making decisions and leading my life not in isolation, but in agglomeration. Sometimes it’s frustrating. Sometimes it’s relieving to know that being an adult doesn’t mean that you can’t mooch off other people who have been adults longer, and shoplift a bit of their adultness for your own. You don’t have to pawn off the impulse to have people around, to want to ask them for advice, to want to share stories, to want to hear that they’re proud of you. I heard myself today, settling into the conviction that I am an adult, and I hear myself now, saying that my childhood heart has not gone anywhere. I don’t think me being an adult means leaving the child I was behind, not really.
I’m coming to realise that adulthood is a bit about time. It’s owning your time, fighting off the pressures that want to swallow your being. It’s a bit about reclaiming the things that make life fun, the things that you can enjoy with abandon if you have a little money and a little energy, a little grit and salt and good soles. It’s a bit about going back somewhere and looking for all the bubbles of laughter you released. I looked for them today while time was stumbling and then I looked around at people and thought oh oh oh I needed and I need these people I need these secondhand heroes I need these pun-makers and tricksters I need these huggers and hug-deniers and these collapsible people and these sturdy people and these inflatable imaginations going like balloons up and up and up. They’re looking at the world differently up there. I’m coming up too, to make that world a little bit mine.