Category Archives: Time

18/05/2025

May 18, 2025 By in Ageing, Astrology, Desire, Dreams, Love, Registry, Time Tags: , , , , , Leave a comment

And so may / We make time / To try and find somebody else / Who has aligned

– Interpol, “C’mere” (2004)

“It’s a jaded love song – very bitter” was what Interpol’s (the 2000s post-punk revival band) main vocalist Paul Banks remarked about their track “C’mere”, from their 2004 record Antics. he was 26 by then. i’m a bit older than that now getting into this particular band. it’s apparent that by our late 20s – perhaps also due to our ongoing respective Saturn Returns – many of us would have begun noticing our age. having an ‘old soul’ turns out to be very different from ageing. people used to say how i was the former. now i’m both. ageing has a toll. the toll is the number of roads taken up to that point.

i wonder if you would still keep up, if you would still read this. i like to think that you have suffered greatly but now you have happiness. i have suffered greatly but now i have suffering. this is the period where we shift into a phase where we can no longer get any younger. where the years are becoming hard counters. if you are reading this, you know already how much i love you. while loving you i think of the time ticking, how long my body and heart can last. my heart has held up for you – it’s afraid that if it stops beating my love for you perishes with it. i think of all the people who have wanted you happiness too, and i know i’m not the only one. i’m not special, and that’s alright. i have loved many others too, like you already have and are loving. but after all these years, i have loved no other quite like how i love you. again, i’m not special in that, and that’s really okay. again, these things happen. we try to find somebody else.

i’ve seen you fall in love over and over. it does feel like ageing. you know it’s ageing when the circumstances are different and the same, and how that paradox is gradually inscribed into your bones. i still dream of earning what you can keep. i haven’t watched the moonlight with you just to witness nothing happening as a small miracle. i have watched you fall in love again. if i wanted to make you content and safe i would. if someone else wanted to make you content and safe i would be glad that they are there to do so. i know it’s human for me to feel pangs and unease. i’ve felt it already and thought of everything i could. i’m still looking out there to see where my desire takes me – you know, i learnt that from you. i wonder about how yearning and grieving almost feel the same, despite the former anticipating loss and the latter having experienced loss. but i’ve already been through all of that, and i take inventory, see what i have in store to soothe while my heart aches periodically.

if you’re reading this, and actually reading this – ageing was something i wanted to experience with you. some of the painful kind, but also the graceful kind. for the years to come i’m willing learn to love your liver spots and recalibrate our diets. i’ll remember some of your ex-lovers and you’ll recall some of mine. but in the right here right now, that’s too latent, too early. but i try to keep my promises, and these are some of them i will make to you.

the search for something else continues. you and i know that i’ve made the choice to take the hurt as it comes. and growing old is finding new ways of living while clinging on to old mementoes. it’s to never really move on but find the courage to keep on living anyhow. i think of how long it has been, and how we’ve all changed in ways. i have learnt that love lasts so long and strong after all. as long as i’m alive and fighting i’ll see you around and miss you in many different ways. i can find my joints gradually liquefying and still dare more to dream – even if there’s things in the way along the way, that i can still be with you one day, for once.

03/11/2024

November 3, 2024 By in Children, Desire, Life, Love, Rain, Registry, Sun, Time, Water Tags: , , , , , Leave a comment

looking down, what do i tell the child in front of me?

the child that looks at me, fears my height, sees the gulf in time that separates us?

that i am just like you, in every way. in being enchanted by dust specks whirling in a small storm, illuminated by the morning rays through a gap in space. or the spectral quality of glittering dew drops in the emerging sun, after a bout of long rain. or the manner in which fingers tumble and smooth across the grilles of a wooden gate, inviting a plethora of textures to be surprised by.

but how to describe the scars. the discovery of love, desire, sex, intimacy, care, work, and violence – that these are things that render loneliness. that you don’t need to want everything in the world to want so much. a good kiss, a warm hug, a hand that makes one feels at home… all of a sudden one is thrust into a world and time in history where these things are scarce. they are given with strings attached, written on an accounting score. they are purchase. when people who want to love are also people who have been violated, who have been damaged in the name of exchange or towards a deity that revels in exploitation, the capacity to hurt another is a specter that lingers and creeps, always raring to make a gotcha, an unwelcome entrance. you can be blamed for wanting too much. you can be made a fool for giving so much love. each time you look back, hurt encompasses as the fog of a warzone, difficult to see past. once again you’re alone. you started with being enchanted by dust through sunlight in a gap, and now you have found yourself alone, starved of magic, missing skin and saliva and taste and receding warmth. you have missed the things that matter in this world. you are belated. you are too late. you miss the steps. you miss the boat. you miss this. you miss them. you are late. you are still too late.

what can you tell the child in front of you? what happened to you?

28/10/2024

October 28, 2024 By in Alternatives, Death, Desire, Forests, Love, Music, Registry, Time, Timelines, Universe Tags: , , , , Leave a comment

The divine has placed us / In a small world

– Bilal, “Reminisce” (2001)

oh, but of course i have thought of you. seen you in past, present, and future. in our befores and afters. seen you sideways in time and seen your side view. i remember your sideview often. those occasions where the universe lets me skip past the temporal-spatial quandries of the present, i saw your sideview before i would have seen it later.

C has said how, in many contingencies with anyone else i have ever known, i knew you in past lives. of course it was not our first time. although compared to others, our relations were newer. which is to say, less baggage, and some very faint inklings of back then.

when i know you sideways, i know what could have been. knowing how we would have spent more time where we were younger. me, still shy, but attempting to be direct. what your next tattoo would have been, i would never have expected still. i make certain decisions to be more courageous, to deal with certain demons from my past, all so that they will never get to hurt you. all this sideways knowledge.

somewhere in the deep past is still something about you i have yet to remember. maybe it is something plain and whimsical. i like the sound of the word whimsical. i think about how it would sound like when you play it with your tongue. perhaps the tinkling that comes with your own enunciation is what i will eventually recall. that timbre that soothes me so deep. it has a forest feeling to it. and the forests and jungles are sites of low intensity warfare across communities, peoples, and tribes — arborescence and fauna and slime alike. i hear your timbre ringing through the forest, reaching into time like a swift blade, heavy like claymore. medieval longings in misty proportions, dark as the emergent bog.

later i will see you. in many laters i continue to see you. in many laters the happiness i have wished for you, each incantation varying from tic to guttural stops to syntactical choice to what vocabulary to invoke, manifests sideways across the continuum of the real. each time you receive bountiful harvests, i delight upon my work, all my assistance, and sit back in relief. whatever they call it — possible worlds, universes, timelines — to see how in so many of them, you are cared for and given space, in each contingency in each chance in each phase transition… it leaves my heart molten, unguent, aglow.

now, i show you my red lips. sideways i show them to you too. if you recall anything about me, shall it be this across lives and deaths.

10/11/2023

November 10, 2023 By in Death, Dreams, Ghosts, Love, Memory, Registry, Time Tags: , , , , , Leave a comment

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.