I spent some years of my twenties tethered to a single storyline in my life. It’s the one in which after false starts, and false stops, and what you like to call bad timing, you can love the person you believe you want to, or should, or have all this time. It’s the ‘one day’ storyline. I felt unwilling to let go of its ending, because I was so sure that beyond wanting it, it was something that I was meant to have. It felt guaranteed. I believed in it like certainty; that one day I would be rewarded with some sense of vindication, and how wrong it feels to put the words love and vindication onto the same page. There were other storylines between, some I followed longer than others, but none of which I felt fixated on getting to the end of. I wonder now if my error was in wanting the ending. Endings come quickly, after all. 

My uncle was the first to tell me this, twelve years ago, as I started my freshman year of college, that time speeds up towards endings. That each of the four years that spanned out in front of me, in a form with fixed structure, perhaps the last of their kind, would go by faster than the last. I had not experienced time in this form before, but since it has been given this description, I have felt it everywhere. 

—

This summer, I spend a string of Saturday mornings running for trains. There is no reason to be running, I have no shortage of minutes in which I can stand up from my kitchen table. But instead, I turn left through red lights and sprint up station stairs and try to recall if I turned off the induction stove. I consider the chance of afternoon thunderstorms that could soak the edges of my apartment through balcony doors which may or may not be open. I would know, but I was sitting with small comforts in a couch-less room, my legs wrapped up in a French blanket, propped onto the chair opposite me. I must avoid any minutes in which I might wait on the platform. I could claim it’s because of the smoke or the station’s grime, but maybe it’s because I fear I am wasting entire months, and have no extra minutes to spare.

For months, I make every train, for months, I waste nothing.

Now, I see what I might find in these liminal platform minutes. I start finding the time to wait. It reveals itself as time I’ve always had, and I wonder why I haven’t allowed myself to stand in it before. Maybe it’s because I don’t want to be caught waiting. But it’s in these middle minutes in which time elongates, and storylines expand, not fray towards the endings which I have believed in, under the illusion of certainty, and relief.

—

This is the part I am supposed to get to. Some anecdote or anecdotes to tell you about the type of endings I am talking about. I could tell you first, about my senior year of college, the summer months that approached it, swimming off the Goleta pier in July fog and wringing sweat from our t-shirts on Tunnel Trail. I could tell you about the grinding pace of the first year of grad school, the days I woke up looking forward only to the ending, when I could go back to bed, and the string of 1590 days that accelerated after. I could tell you about the three months I lived in the Peruvian desert, one day surfing the outer break at Baterias, blissfully isolated from the March 2020 world. The next, repatriating to California. Abrupt, I would say. I could tell you about the three months that followed. Time swelled, heat clung to the side of Matt Davis, the marine layer crawled up the western slope of the Dipsea. I didn’t know what city lights looked like from up high until we drove through Ashbury Heights, or was it over Buena Vista? I didn’t know what anguish I would find in this ending.

I could tell you about last July. If I told you about last July, I would tell you that I remember what I ate for breakfast every single day. Well, I did remember, last August, when I was remembering a string of Sundays, and I realized the clarity of each of those thirty-one days. I wrote it down in a list, the breakfasts and their settings, to test myself. I needed some factual cross reference, some verification that I was recalling the rest of it from real memory, too.

If I told you about last July, I would tell you about the day we lay in the hot spots of a creek, and the sunburn it left on my chest. It was 7 pm, too late for sunburns. I would tell you that I must have sat an extra minute in the driver’s seat, before opening my door, because I didn’t want to start my engine and it’s hard to talk through a closed window. I would tell you about the Sunday afternoon we waded hip deep into a reedy lake, about the way someone’s back faces you when they have chosen. I could tell you that you will have to wait four more breakfasts. A peanut butter oat bar driving East, Jet Boiled oatmeal in a horse meadow, a berry scone and a gruyère croissant from the Stanley bakery, a yogurt bowl with a sliced summer peach on a front porch in Missoula, before you will extract this information, highway side. You are intuitive enough, at least, to pull off the exit, so that you can get finally heartbroken at a rest stop that you won’t even remember the name of. If I were to tell you about last July, I would only want to tell you that unexpected endings don’t speed up time, they alter it.

—

It’s late August in Zurich, I have spent days here swimming against the current in the Limmat, I have devoted minutes to waiting on platforms. They are a type of minute I feel less like avoiding, and more inclined to savoring, because this is an ending I didn’t know I would have. I walk leisurely between destinations because I like the way the air cloaks me here. The week passes quickly but the days stretch wide in between, capturing the last pieces of summer. There is lightning flashing above the city, or maybe distant fireworks. I have wrapped new storylines like strands of hair around my fingertips, and I feel them pulling me back and forth across continents and identities. I feel them pulling me in directions that leave me doubting how well I know myself. They tangle and spark, a reflection of this late August sky, conduits of this heat.