August 4, 2021 – Wednesday, 2:21 p.m.
How long has it been now?
I can tell the different stages of my life because I can recognize the moments I became a different person. Some were around the classic landmarks of entering high school, going off to college, finishing college, and then creating a life as a young adult. Those moments are well defined. I can tell how long ago those moments were by comparing who I was then to the present version of myself.
I can measure several years or more. A decade feels like a decade. Five years, that too, I can see clearly. But I have become farsighted when trying to remember the recent past. Unable to put moments from my life in the proper order without a great deal of mental strain.
For this period of my life, I have lost this oddly specific and freakish strength of mine: Remembering details about moments from the past with very little prompting; a great recall for unimportant facts from a mundane life. A family fact-checker with a pedantic streak. I strangely take pride in this ability.
I am sure this is only temporary, but I have lost track of time.
March 29, 2021 – Monday, 12:14 p.m.
Time is a construct.
For the most part, we invented it. And we have built our lives around it. The short and the long. We made it the most important factor in our decision-making process: ‘Is this worth the time?'
A day is the rotation of the Earth. A year is the Earth’s orbit around the Sun. The change in weather, we once upon a time experienced as four distinct enterprises, is based in part upon the titling of the Earth on its axis. Daylight gets longer each day until it starts getting shorter again.
From there we subdivided everything into smaller more manageable units so we could make sense of things. Chunks of time so the moments and conversations and chance happenings that make up our lives could be quantified. We segmented the day and gave each moment value.
Well, it’s only a 93-minute film. The drive is six hours but it is the cutest B&B for the weekend. The crème brûlée is to die for and it is only a 45-minute wait for a table. These peaches are only good for two weeks.
It is March again. That is what we call this period of our lives between winter and spring in the Northern Hemisphere after we divided the year into 12 different months. And it is 2021, that many thousand trips around the Sun since this part of the world decided we would start counting. That many years since the divide between the past and the extreme past.
It has been a year since all of this began. Does it feel like it has been longer? But the memories of the past are still fresh. How long is a year supposed to feel?
October 22, 2020 – Thursday, 3:28 p.m.
“I’m restless. My whole generation is restless.” – F. Scott Fitzgerald in This Side of Paradise.
The entirety of my generation is restless. We are caught between the crush of a terrible present, uncertain future, and the memories of a decent enough past.
For those who are now in and around their 30s, we have experienced (at least these) four crises: 9/11 and the ‘Global War on Terror,’ the Great Recession, a resurgence into the mainstream of white supremacy, and a pandemic.
In between, we lived through the 90s and the Obama years. Both periods were marked with downturns and struggles, and while the general feeling was good, neither were the golden ages many choose to remember them as.
Now we are back in rebuilding mode. The entirety of the world needs time to look at the broken spots and triage what must be repaired first and what can stay broken. Who will get help now and who will be made to suffer for a while longer.
What should the restless do?
It is dark, but there may soon be some light at the end of the tunnel if we remember to squint hard enough and not worry about how far off the distance is. A few breaks go our way and this crisis won’t last too much longer.
But at this moment, we’re stuck being restless because everything we thought we knew is gone. Again. So we must figure out how to adapt in a flash.
Meanwhile many are telling us that we have had it easy. And so many of them are telling us what we had before was the best we’ll ever get. So we’re restless and anxious and feeling cheated out of a future we thought we had within our grasp.
May 18, 2020 – Monday, 3 a.m.
The first rumble of the garbage truck can be heard at 3:23 in the morning. I’m still up to hear it most Mondays.
The shrieks of the family of foxes in the woods of the stream valley behind my house ended hours ago, but I am still awake.
The night is better than the day right now. So I try to sleep through the mornings. The days are full of nothing. Sometimes there are new horrors, but they all feel like the same day. During the night it is harder to tell. The night is better.
February 14, 2021 – Sunday, 6:36 p.m.
There is such a lull of action in life at the moment. I am in month 11 of ‘the prison’ and I have got nothing left to do. There truly is nothing happening. What is there to do or even think about doing?
I think one of my great fears is that I have forgotten how to do things. At times I don’t remember what it was that I liked to do. Normal activities? And plan things and do regular bits of stuff? I have a hard time remembering how exactly I lived a life. I’ve got no routines left because I’ve thrown out all of my expectations of normal.
It was too depressing to think about normal so I figured I best protected myself by forgetting.
September 10, 2020 – Thursday, 9:14 a.m.
Six months from the start of this. That’s where we are now. Six months. Six months since the world stopped being the world and we started living in a new one which we built on the fly.
Thinking about what has stayed the same is the easier way to look at things compared to cataloging the ways everything is different.
I’m sick of this.
August 6, 2021 – Friday, 12:03 a.m.
I lost track of time again.
I don’t know if time slips away a bit easier now than it did in the recent past, but when it does, the slipping has become more painful. There’s a more tangible sense of regret and disappointment at letting another little bit of time be lost because now it feels like time has more value.
The time that slips goes to many different places, but the realization, the snapping back into full consciousness, and seeing that time did not stop when my attention wandered is always the same.
July 25, 2020 – Saturday, 11:42 p.m.
The worst nostalgia is that for an invented past. A past that wasn’t ever there. You’ll chase that forever. Best to at least be chasing something that was real.
October 22, 2020 – Thursday, 3:44 p.m.
Is the idea of normal gone forever? Is this how we should now picture normal? Is the new normal always asking if this is the new normal?
Life is a series of constantly making adjustments, so is this just normal? Or is this how the brain rationalizes massive changes: We declare it normal and move on because doing anything else would wreck our heads for days on end and then one day set off a massive crisis when trying to make soup.
Or is the quest for normal a foolish one? That seems especially so now. “Normal? You just can’t get there from here.” There is no returning to pre-this normal after the total upending of our lives. We are changed. We can’t go back in time to who we were before all of this.
And we must continue to embrace that change and figure how we can change for the better. That’s an optimistic view of things at the moment.
August 7, 2021 – Saturday, 4:26 p.m.
I can sometimes measure the phases in my life by tracking changes in relationships. Changes in friendships. There are adjustments and awkward moments. Sometimes that is when a relationship ends. There are cycles in life.
I have been the one in a relationship who is changing and I have done the reverse. I have experienced my life stand still as those around me advance. That is much less fun, entering a new phase of life through stagnation. Experiencing life's movement through non-movement.
But when everything stops? My life did not change and, at the same time, the lives of those around me stayed the same. We all experienced the same thing. Separate but together. And that was awful.
March 8, 2021 – Monday, 8:25 p.m.
A passage from Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness:
“Light came out of this river since—you say Knights? Yes; but it is like a running blaze on a plain, like a flash of lightning in the clouds. We live in the flicker—may it last as long as the old earth keeps rolling!”
We live in the flicker…
August 7, 2021 – Saturday, 5:18 p.m.
The last 17 months happened, but they are all one jumble of instances in my head.
Life is measured around the spikes of emotion. I can remember almost every moment – where I was, who I was with, what I did, what I said to whom – during a very happy September 15 one year. And I can tell you all those same details for another year’s disastrous September 14.
I can orientate myself from those two days. I can measure my life, track how I changed, and figure out how things ended up the way they did. There are forks in the road and I know which direction I chose. And can spot the smart choices and the mistakes.
In the recent past, the world flattened out. Gauging one moment from the next was impossible. I can tell normalcy is beginning to return because the spikes have returned.
But the recent past remains a foggy landscape. In a specific memory, there are details but no connective tissue tying one moment to the next.
August 6, 2021 – Friday, 6:22 p.m.
So how long is a year? How long is it meant to feel?
It has been over a year. We know more than we did back then. We are at the end game. We know it makes a horse and a barn but we still haven’t put the final few pieces into the jigsaw just yet.
So why does it still feel like this is still last year? We are still living in the constant state of last year?
Ben Krimmel is a writer from Baltimore who lives in New York.