Above: Gary, playing a song and eating his pick at the same time
I spent the last two days visiting friends in northern New Jersey. I didn’t ride any bicycles. I didn’t run. I didn’t do anything strenuous. I simply ate, talked, hung out at a park, and relaxed. Yet I still prepared for my departure. Kind of.
One of the most time-consuming steps in preparing for a long trip abroad is visiting friends and family. Thankfully, I get along with my friends and family, so this step isn’t agonizing in the least. Time passes differently though when you know your company will be absent from your life for the next two years. Hours fly by and fill slots in the day usually reserved for minutes. Stories and jokes become punctuated not by their conclusions or punchlines but instead by the smiles they inspire on the faces of your friends. You notice the passage of time. You kick yourself for not appreciating your friends and family more when no trips were in the works, when time seemed to smother you with its abundance. With the exception of feeling criminal regret, you feel much like a dead-man-walking.
Hmmmm.
OK, maybe the dead-man-walking thing is a reach. I can, after all, still order a pizza or spend a day in a park. But in terms of how I perceive time, the comparison is a valid one. We don’t value our time until we find it slipping from us.
Above: Writing songs on a sunny Saturday afternoon in Eagle Rock Park.
Time that was once shared smoothly between a group of friends becomes fractured and personalized when that group of friends gets spread thin over distance and circumstance. Syncing up again and recreating a pace of life, of time, that can cloak everyone comfortably is not an easy thing to do. Awkward re-greetings are involved. Frenzied conversation spins out over long dinners that never seem long enough. Blushed descriptions of new loves and broken hearts swirl and tangle over foreign coffee tables. All seems disjointed and worth talking about, but before you know it, the buzzer rings. Time is up. Next event. Next chapter starts in someone’s life.
Above: It’s really hard to stop doing this once you leave Japan. Really, really hard.
Our lives, if transcribed, would read out like high school biographical essays. Paragraphs, created solely to document new emotions or events, would orbit their nucleic introductory time order words. First. Then. Finally. Next. Supporting, rambling sentences would spell out the monotony of our lives, our gas station pit stops, our broken bowl sighs. But the starts of paragraphs! Man, they’d be the feasts our eyes waited for. They’d signify the start of bike trips, new jobs, sudden deaths, love blooms, and they’d start with a punch. As the sentences peeled on, the energy of the transition words, the fresh flush of a shift in time, would fade and sink into the gaps between the letters. At some point, readers would begin to skim for the start of the next paragraph, the mark of the emergence of excitement.
Next, fdei wighwi thgithgiw wekeithg sk fighw skw eighapq qeipirphg nvhahg eith haiwptith ghti hgbi righri bhieth bipapw iwtiguthgk aiw b iwkei bheighrithbiw weighirhg bheiskwe.
Just then, wigheibpa wieigth widiw cckdi woibignhkirunbm awkm sa;wpick,w ibhwiapic dkwigh b;wick wwppaabp whwiekb.c, wpwiepghb
Enough rambling. Breakfast awaits,
Andrew
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