how long does it take?

on wasted time and moving forward and moving on and not moving at all

It’s halfway through November and I feel like I’m slipping through time, days on days on days piling up behind me faster than I know what to do with them. The first bites of frigid air this week were scary not because of how they signal the onslaught of winter, but because of how they signal so much time passed without me noticing. I blinked and summer has suddenly dissolved into fall; fall has suddenly caved into winter.

I can’t help but feel bad about what seems like so much wasted time. In college, I am increasingly starting to see time as a finite resource. College time, specifically, feels scarce and valuable, a final four years of youth built to hold what I’m told is immeasurable amounts of memories and mistakes and self-discovery. And so, I can’t help but feel like I’ve wasted the last few months living in the past, or otherwise in some strange not-in-the-present liminal space, for me to have emerged from the fall semester untouched by the passage of time. This is to say that I feel like the same person now that I did two or five months ago, and that I’m unsettled by how little has changed.

By how little has changed, I guess I mean to say that I am still not over It. The thought is borderline horrifying — that I am the kind of girl that could be so permanently altered by a single person’s leaving. I’m shocked at how much my perception of time could warp after everything ended, my stubborn habit to hold on for as long as possible collapsing the past — and every imagined, unborn future — into the present.

Still, I am knee-deep in counterfactuals, always musing on the almost-lives and past-lives and unlived-lives that could’ve come to fruition if only I’d had the foresight to make it so. There is so much guilt that stems from the notion that who I am now is something that I’ve inflicted on myself.

My new goal is to be over It by the New Year. By It, though, I’m not even sure what I mean anymore. I refuse to believe that all of this could stem from the loss of a person whose voice I can now barely remember.

I’m not sure who it is that I’m supposed to be, but I can’t shake the feeling that I should’ve emerged from this different by now. Or, at the very least, happier. In the thick of it all, people tell me — I tell myself — to give it time. The solution, often, is simply time. After having exhausted what feels like every other actionable solution (and trust me, I’ve tried) sometimes all there is left to do is submit to the whims of the days or weeks or months that it will take for things to get better.

I haven’t decided if time is fluid, rushing by me faster than I can grab onto it, or if it has simply eluded me. It’s an odd feeling, because it exists in spite of the fact that I have kept myself very busy, meaning I have actually made my time as full as possible. Since the ending of things, I have spent two months living abroad; I have visited my parents’ childhood homes, thousands of miles away from my own; I have made new friends and gone to therapy and run three miles every day (until I decided I actually despise running) and joined a sorority and started a new job, whose money I have spent on concert tickets and raves and restaurants and Amtrak rides.

These are all proof that I have been places and done things. That I am moving forward. That I am so, incredibly lucky. And yet, a couple weeks ago on Halloween, I broke down sobbing on the sticky floor of a frat house, the jungle juice loosening my thoughts from my brain in a way that resulted in some rambling, atrocious monologue on how I have, for a long time, felt sad and don’t know how to stop. I woke up on that frat house’s couch the next morning, hair matted and last-minute costume still on, with what was presumably a barf bag by my side.

If anyone who was privy to my breakdown ever reads this, I’m so sorry. If the dude in the goose (?) outfit who I was crying to in warbled Vietnamese ever sees this, I’m extra sorry. A frat house on Halloweekend is decisively not the place to overshare about my feelings, this much I know.

Besides the realization that I will probably not be allowed to step foot in that house again, and that I will probably look back on this with embarrassment for the foreseeable future, the events of Halloween were jarring for a variety of other reasons. It’s the way that the seasons have changed and many unofficial college holidays — orientation week, Halloweekend, homecoming — have come and gone, and I am still stuck in the same place I have been for months now. Which is to say my drunken self was being strangely honest when she admitted that I am still improbably, unexplainably sad. The thought of so much wasted time is one that makes me feel a strange kind of grief.

Last night, I was up past midnight working on an English essay when I stumbled upon a quote that I liked from Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictee. Even through the 2am brain fog, I found something about this excerpt particularly interesting.

You are going somewhere. You are somewhere. This stillness. You cannot imagine how… New movement, ending only to extend into the next movement. Stops as elongation into the new movement. You move. You are being moved. You are movement.

I remember highlighting this passage of Dictee when I read it for the first time as part of a freshman English class. Revisiting the novel this year for another class, I can’t say I understand it much more. I might never understand Cha’s elusive, fragmented writing — which is unfortunate, and also explains why I’m currently writing this instead of working on a class essay on that very topic. Something about this passage in particular, though, stood out to me even more when finding it the second time than it did the first.

As part of the section “Calliope,” the meaning behind this particular piece of Cha’s writing likely references a larger discussion on the burdens of migration and memory as viewed through the lens of her mother. However, self-indulgent as I am, the meaning I secretly ascribe to the passage is more so related to the way that Cha has somehow encompassed how I feel about life and time and the way that I am currently being propelled through it.

For the purposes of my analogy, Cha describes movement as a state of being that feels liminal, both controlled and uncontrollable.

You move. You are being moved. You are movement. I am moving through life just as much as life is moving me, just as much as I am inhabiting each movement I make.

You are going somewhere. You are somewhere. This stillness. I am in so many places at once, grateful for where I am just as often as I am afraid and dissatisfied and uncomfortable, simultaneously hurdling towards a future I am terrified of and still impossibly stuck in events that happened months ago.

New movement, ending only to extend into the next movement. Stops as elongation into the new movement. It is this part, though, that I think I like the most. Here, I imagine momentum. I imagine Cha describing temporal movement, days not rushing so much as stepping forward, one after the other, in a way that is both graceful and unavoidable. But it is Cha’s emphasis on the idea of new movement that I like. The passage of time feels less scary if I think about it from this lens, from the idea that each day ends only to extend into something new and necessary.

I can’t say that this discovery has led to any sort of revelation that would feel perfectly satisfying. I can only say that I am trying to blame myself less, whether that be for time wasted or time spent in the “wrong” ways or even for time that has already been buried far in the past. Time simply flows as it pleases and does what it wants. This is how I am trying to think of it now. Movement extending into new movement. Today I clawed open a memory and yesterday I chose softness and tomorrow I can only hope to be lucky enough to wake up and do it all again.