By all accounts, time has loosened up. It’s playing tricks. Days of the week are disjointed and quarantine deadlines keep stretching further into the future, seemingly by arbitrary criteria.
Time was already relative. Now it’s just become bizarre in its unstructured format. Meal times are nebulous, especially when you have a family of five and are operating on five separate biorhythms. Brunchy snacks. Lunchy dinner. Midnight nibbles. An endless cycle of washing dishes.
I hear from many people that they are thinking of deceased loved ones and wishing for their presence and comfort at this time. Sometimes, in that weird out-of-body time before bed, I think about happy memories. I even think about life a month and a half ago, when a semblance of normal was taken for granted. Remember when grocery stores didn’t smell like sanitizer? When you could talk to a cashier without a mask or a glass sneeze guard?
I miss things. I think of my dead mother and father. I think of my grandma, who died on January 1st of this year, and I’m glad she didn’t live to experience the isolation and fear of quarantine — an isolation and fear that, ironically, seems to be worse for already-marginalized senior citizens.
My concentration is shot. An inversion has happened wherein everyone on social media is suddenly a stay-at-home artist. And I don’t have the brain power to write creatively. I have little desire to play music.
What is this world? I’ll be honest: I have few answers.
There’s this book I keep thinking about. I read it a few years ago. It was a nonfiction account about life after a massive earthquake in Japan. A few years after the quake, life had not resumed to normal. There was still trauma and destruction everywhere. Some people had moved on; many had not adapted at all. There was a clear distinction in the public consciousness of a Before Time and an After Time. The quake was the dividing line..
Time don’t reverse for anyone.
From the Epicenter 