And while I wait, I think of all the other people who are waiting. Not just in the present, but at all times. There is a wide splay of people, all waiting, through time waiting. Waiting for something other than the end of the world. Or so they think. But I know.
Personally, I don’t think of time as a process or a fluid or a space. I think of it like a block full frozen, like those pieces you can’t chunk off your windshield. And the past you and the future you, all of them, and you, they’re all frozen in time. They all exist simultaneously, even the impossible ones. Those are like the air bubbles. They lend shape and texture to the rest, form local contours, trap scents. You can look back through time at all the other frozen people, sitting or mid-stride or pre-thought or post-cry. Really, they’re all waiting. They’re waiting for the next moment, waiting for the universe to continue.
Waiting for the one time it doesn’t! That’s the never moment. It never comes, that relief. All these molecules and particles are like actors who’ve needed to be in character for gajillions of years without a single break. Let them rest! I can see their legs trembling, all shaking in unison, dancers in a forced dance forever. Even the still ones have such a grimace. They look towards the shadows but still I squint and see them, eyes full of pain. I touch my heart for them, for a moment, before I become entranced by some key figure in the front and center. It is an old hand costumed as a child, bounding towards me, joints cracking to perform once again the ritual of light entering my eyes, stimulating some familiar steps of thought. For some reason a German governess is there to the left, chanting von-toot-zree, von-toot-zree. I am swept into it and I can remember but I still forget that this is all just a production.
The moments of my life hang like beads on a catenary, so natural and taut. But I wonder if I would even notice if they were rethreaded into a different order, if a few trillion were pulled from the sequence to be reintroduced at some random point. Perhaps they could be completely scrambled, the string cut during some captive silence, and then they all spill out onto an ethereal tabletop, or even spill off such a spooky tabletop into some laughing eternal void. These…moments…spell…you!, it titters.
Why even insist on a restriction to myself? Instead of a string of only me, interleave it with others. Group us not by person, but by mood. All the pensive moments on one string, one after another in rapid fire. It’s a string of pensiveness. A string of people waiting, and you could be an entity experiencing all these moments of waiting in an arbitrary order, becoming all the different people joined by this shared non-activity. If I as a person am fully engrossed in the experience of waiting, if I am in a state of maximum waiting, to the utmost exclusion of everything else, aren’t I just the same as any other waiting person? Perhaps waiting isn’t the sexiest example. Try a person at peak orgasm instead, a mind-shattering orgasm, mind-erasing and identity-lapsing. Perhaps each of those are the same singular moment experienced by different people at different times. All strings threaded through the same, single ecstasy-bead. When I downshift into crushing heartbreak. When I straight chug a loving reunion. When I splat flat onto the battered nadir of despair. I’m not me then, I’m a moment. In those all-consuming moments my soul is fast fused with all other similar souls. What else could even be meant by outside of time.
The world has already ended. This waiting is a wish that has already been granted. You were always sitting there when you were sitting there, always waking up when you woke up, always dead when you were dead and never before. If only you could, by turning your head, look out across time rather than along it, you might see me looking at you, shrugging my shoulders, waiting with cordial discontinuity.
saltednotion 