I’m leaving.
I’ve stayed in the same place for so long, I’ve started to see the ugliness in everything. The cracks on the walls, the dirt between the floorboards, the stains on the ceiling. Sometimes I spend so much time waiting for time to pass, I start to blend in with the furniture. One time, I stood still for so long, flowers grew on my face: chrysanthemums on the nose, roses on the cheeks, dandelions inside my mouth. The curtains were drawn, but there was a moth-eaten hole through which I could see the world outside. The people on the street carried bags full of groceries, with children running ahead of them, muddy sneakers and bruised knees. Be careful! Watch for the cars! A couple dancing on the apartment on the other side of the street, glasses of wine on their hands. I can’t hear the music, but I can hear the cars, The wind blowing through the leaves of the trees, a wind chime in the distance. The world continues its cycle while I wait.
After a while, I moved. My eyelids made a creaking sound, petals fell on my lap. As I moved my arms, dust danced in circles against the light coming from the little hole in the curtains.
I decided to build a machine that will take me somewhere else; somewhen else. A safer place, a distant place. The room will still be the same – the floorboards will be dirtier and the cracks on the walls bigger, but my eyes will be different. They’ll be kinder, my words softer, my hands steadier. This time will be left frozen on the sheaves of the machine, stuck in the cold metal, pinned down by the screws.
I know this for certain because I’ve memorized all the theory: how very things are permanent, how time heals all, how phases come and go. I just can’t keep waiting. The present has too much of the past in it. The past has no future for me.
I read somewhere that lower down, all processes are slower. So, I’ve been staying a lot of time on the ground. I need more time to work on the machine. Other days, I climb to the highest points of town and wait for the clock to start clicking faster. If the machine won’t work, maybe I can make time go faster in some other way. Maybe if I sit here long enough, by the time I go home, things will have changed. I won’t recognize the clothes on the wardrobe or the photos on the walls, and I’ll know that it worked.
Always so much time waiting.
I gathered some materials. I kept finding them everywhere. In drawers, pockets, on the floor, behind boxes, in my bed, outside, laying on the ground. Everywhere I went, I saw them: a wooden box, some screws, sheaves, a lightbulb, two blue buttons, some ribbon, a wrinkly moth wing, broken glass, fingernails – some still had chipped pink nail polish in them. I put all the pieces on a table near the window in my bedroom and start planning. O bico do lápis partiu-se várias vezes enquanto escrevinhava medidas e ângulos, e a mesa rapidamente se encheu de aparas pretas e castanhas, pedacinhos de carvão a sujar a toalha azul. Still, I work until the sun disappears and the ground is filled with pencil shavings. The pencil itself is now smaller than my thumb. I massage my fingers where the pencil touched them, leaving a pink-reddish mark.
The moon greets me with its milky light, and I stop. I pick up the sheet of paper and observe my work. It’s perfect. Every piece fits neatly into each other, not an inch of space left inside the box.
The watchmaker didn’t have the parts I needed. “Too many people have come here looking for the same thing”. I bought every watch I could find. I’ll get the parts myself.
The machine is stagnant. The sheaves don’t move, the lamp doesn’t turn on, there’s no sound.
I’m running out of time.
—
This is time for us. Memory. A nostalgia. The pain of absence. But it isn't absence that causes sorrow. It is affection and love. Without affection, without love, such absences would cause us no pain.
For this reason, even the pain caused by absence is in the end something good and even beautiful. Because it feeds on that which gives meaning to life.
Carlo Rovelli, The Order of Time
Because everything that begins must end. What causes us to suffer is not in the past or the future: it is here, now, in our memory, in our expectations. We long for timelessness, we endure the passing of time: we suffer time. Time is suffering
I am my mother’s caresses, and the serene kindness with which my father calmly guided me; I am my adolescent travels; I am what my reading has deposited in layers in my mind; I am my loves, my moments of despair, my friendships, what I’ve written, what I’ve heard; the faces engraved on my memory. I am, above all, the one who a minute ago made a cup of tea for himself. The one who a moment ago typed the word “memory” into his computer. The one who just composed the sentence that I am now completing. If all this disappeared, would I still exist? I am this long, ongoing novel. My life consists of it.
Carlo Rovelli, The Order of Time
I will wait. I have all the time in the world.