Time has stopped again.

I have been tracking the way time flows. It has not moved a lot, or even a bit on some days. When it does it goes in a recursion. I am tired of going backwards. From backwards I return to stasis. Dread accompanies those loops. Dreams intensify those loops. It’s like being infected by a temporal sickness. Whenever time stops still at 0s/s it feels the closest to death itself. In death time stops for a single person – in a localized field of stasis. While outside the field time goes on in other ways.

There are so many things I would like to say. Sometimes I whisper them in my dreams. Dreams become a very unreliable sandbox. Outside of dreamtime I wonder if it is worth it to say anything at all. I play scenarios in my head, both in sobriety and dreams. I try not to replay actual past scenarios. For when I do, I would begin to edit things: add a what-if here, and a could-have there. Time would loop backwards again like a song on replay but backwards. Ocean Vuong’s Time Is A Mother has a poem that does that. Rewind and stop, rewind and stop. It is one thing to rewind, but another to stop. So much of memory are frozen moments drained of life and time. To capture, to freeze joy or pain like that, as if it were a precious crystal barely unchanging, is cruel. It does no justice to the complexity of recollection to remember like this. To resume time forwards or backwards even worse so. It is like reanimating literal skeletons in one’s closet. It is necromancy. It is trying to reimbue life to something that just wants to rest. Skeletons just want to be dead and buried.

The obvious solution is to let go. Let go of time. Let go of memory. Let it reflow. Not something that I have mastery of. Something that takes time to learn. Time has stopped.