Letter 47 – Sense of Time

Dear Garrett,

One thing that’s happened as a result of your death is that my sense of time has become more elastic. I ask myself, did that happen yesterday, five years ago, or six months ago? Patches of my history are gone. I don’t remember things, and I don’t remember when things happened. When I think about you, I sometimes feel the shock of grief just under the surface, as if it all did happen yesterday. And sometimes I feel the distance of time in your death. I know it didn’t happen yesterday. I’ve begun to incorporate the acceptance of your death into my physical self, so that my body understands this, too.

Physical memory. I don’t know if there is a real term for this, but it feels like sometimes my body understands things and knows things separately from my mind. A lot of times, it’s my body that leads the way. Sometimes it feels like everything just happened. Other times, it doesn’t. I appreciate when a sense of distance gives me a little bit of rest. To feel a sense normalcy for a while. My life has been reshaped and one of the results is this different perception of time.

For me, one kind of time is linear and provides a guide to line up my past and arrange a type of regular, everyday routine. But another sense of time has emerged. It’s elastic, based on feeling and physical response. Memories no longer framed within a timeline, but more immediate or distant according to a different set of laws. I don’t know them. I just experience the results. And I accept that this is the way it is now. I have no idea when something might have happened. It doesn’t matter. I have holes where I have no memories at all. Someone at work will say to me, remember when that happened, or, remember when you said this or made that decision? No. No, I have no memory of it at all. What year did that happen? I guess we’ll go with that, then.

I wish I could describe the sensation accurately. The best analogy I can come up with is, it’s like a piece of used gum a girl spits out into her hand. She stretches the gum and mushes it back together and then stretches it again and pokes a hole into some of the thin parts, and then she twists it around one more time before popping it back into her mouth. That’s time.