A Practical Study of Time

There is no correct tense to time. Once you’ve gotten outside of it, there’s no way to keep your verbs straight.

This is the first challenge facing any academic looking to study time—practically, of course. If you’re sticking to the theoretical, well, then use all the verbs you like; your studies won’t have any controls, so you might as well throw accuracy out the window.

I can’t keep tense straight here, so I might as well write in present. Everything is always happening, always has happened, always will happen, so I might as well take the middle ground.

Vera laughs at me, when I see her—when, what a foolish concept. “Your ‘peers’ won’t ever see this,” she says, nudging my elbow. It’s hard to feel like anything is tangible, only impressions of feelings, but I can feel her.

She sits across from me in a South Carolina rest stop diner, her motorcycle at the curb outside. The year is 1972, before I’ve even been born. Her teeth catch the edge of a striped straw slumping lethargically in a neapolitan milkshake, and she taps my notebook.

“You’re really keeping a record of all this?” she asks.

There’s a date at the top, pulled from the newspaper stand outside, a detailed description of the diner, the waitress, Vera’s red lipstick grin. I don’t know whether or not the people around us can properly see us, when we meet—when is a difficult word—but it would certainly get attention if I kissed the smirk off of her face, South Carolina in ’72. Different races, same gender—I decide this isn’t the place to test it.

Vera’s bolder than I am, but even she looks around like she’s testing something. “I can tell you all about this diner. I fucked my ex once in the bathroom. It’s filthy. You want to record that?”

“No,” I said, but I guess I’m recording it after all.

She grins. “He was also filthy.”

When I see her next—next, whatever that means—it’s a bus stop in Kyoto, and neither of us are corporeal enough to be drenched by the rain. No one else seems to notice as she holds an umbrella over our heads. I don’t know where it came from or why she has it, considering the rain passes through it as much as it passes through us. She’s never had an umbrella before.

“Fancy meeting you here.”

I don’t know what order she’s experiencing “all this” in. I ask her like I’ve asked her a hundred times—maybe infinite times—to write it down, but on this bench she just shrugs , pops her chewing gum. “Do you know what year it is?” I don’t. “It’s 2007. There’s a crisis in 2008, right?” I nod. “Wonder how many people will lose their jobs,” she says, as though it’s a game, guessing who among the passengers will be unemployed within the year. My father lost his house—will lose his house. It’ll be bulldozed within a decade, replaced with luxury condos.

Speaking in future tense is difficult.

“You’re so funny,” Vera says on the bus—I don’t know how we’ve gotten on. I certainly don’t have any currency that this country accepts, let alone a bus pass. Vera’s from Georgia, didn’t make it outside the south before she ended up here. She was headed for California, running from an ex-boyfriend who’d caught her kissing another girl—not me. We hadn’t met then—then, always already happening.

She didn’t make it west of the Mississippi.

“You’re so worried about linear time passing. Just let it flow, you know?”

I’ve asked her how long she’s been in this temporal slipstream, and every time I get the same sharp-toothed smile in response.

I tell her about my father’s house, still standing in Glasgow in 2007, while her fingers trace the lines of my palms. It feels like the only tangible thing that has touched me in a decade, but I swear I saw her yesterday. I remark this to her, and she cocks her head, her braids swinging with the movement and the sway of the bus.

“I thought it’d been thirty-five years,” she says, with that same coy grin, and this time I chase it, catching her against the window. The old woman behind us clucks her tongue at us for the public display of affection more than anything else. We’re not really here to her—anything she might have to say hasn’t even settled in her mind, probably never will.

Vera’s eyes are so bright, a warm brown, even in the rain, and the soft skin of her nose is the most real thing I’ve felt against mine in—

How long has it been?

I whisper for her to stay. We both know there is no here or there, no stay or go.

Do people remember us in the places we pause? Does the old woman remember the girls she clucked her tongue at? I remember her—remember, as if it’s something that’s already happened.

It’s hard to tell. Maybe my own experiments are no more controlled than yours, you who are experiencing time front to back, because I cannot return to your time; I only have memory to go off of and even that’s difficult to trace.

“Isn’t it strange that we always end up on earth?” I ask, in a shitty club where we can barely hear each other in 2129, and she laughs. She always seems to be laughing. I wonder if that’s where time found her—laughing on the interstate, trying to make it west as fast as she possibly can.

“Maybe earth is all there is,” she says, and her voice turns mechanical. “Maybe I’m secretly an alien. Take me to your leader, earthling.” I almost lose my journal in the hubbub.

Time once found me leaving my apartment in Edinburgh, a stack of neatly graded papers in my bag. I wonder if another me is passing them back, oblivious to the fate of this Steph, somewhere in the stream of time. Maybe there are versions of me that don’t get caught by wayward time, looking to gobble up a grad student trying to get past a dissertation committee.

I’m not trying to get tenure. I’m just trying to find a way out.

It’s about time I admit that. I don’t think I’m meant to move through time like this, out of sync like a bad clock, even if I have someone to find me at the—it’s not an ending. It’s only a resting place, and even that isn’t certain.

Is it alright to say that every time I lose her again, I’m afraid that I’ll be left alone here?

(Here. There is no here. There’s only her.)

She smiles, in another place. “What does time matter?” she whispers. I don’t remember my flat in Edinburgh anymore, but I remember the smell of her hair, her cherry red smile, a laugh on the wind on I-10 in Mississippi.

Things don’t change here, but they’re never the same, so I’m throwing accuracy out the window. I still feel like myself—myself, as if anything is permanent. As if I know what that is anymore.

All I know, all I need to know, is Vera, and time.

© M.P. Rosalia

About the Author

M.P. Rosalia is a writer and artist of many forms who enjoys playing with format and writes about gods, identity, and time, and when not writing, prefers to spend time petting cats, climbing trees, and making a mess of oil paints. Rosalia has recently been published in Radon Journal.