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  • Lost Time
    Kira Howe
    26 Jun 2004

    A couple of nights ago I was up late watching a movie. In it, one of the characters, a young woman, gets a call one ordinary evening saying that the man who raised her is in the hospital being treated for a heart attack. She hangs up the phone, grabs her purse and darts for the door, hair flying, face pale. She doesn't tell anyone else in her home that she's leaving. Cut to the woman alone in her car, driving as fast as possible through the dark, and looking at her face, I suddenly realize I know how this feels.

    I know what people mean now, when they say they're drowning, or being swept up, swept away in an avalanche or tidal wave. I know how that feels.

    You lose all control. Somehow, without warning, you're in the car and you're flying over the road. You didn't tell yourself to go. Something made you. And when you run to your family and put your arms around them, that isn't your choice either. There's no such thing as choices anymore, just action. Stupid, useless action.

    I remember some of my early visits to the beach as a kid. Your parents tell you to watch out for the undertow, but you don't give it a second thought until it grabs you. All of a sudden you're so far out and so far north of your spot on the sand. Then you try to get back, easy does it, and now you feel the pull. Mermaids' fingers clawing at your feet. The whole ocean is pulling you away, the abyss is pulling you down, and it dawns on you that you are powerless. Strength drains away. For a moment, you just want to lower your head and lose yourself, forget your life, forget your spot on the sand. But you keep swimming.

    It's now more than a year later, and I still ask myself why I did some of things I did, why I said this or didn't say that. How I retained any sense of balance, I don't know. I didn't have any idea what I was doing.

    Time abandons you. There's barely a trace of yesterday and you've never even heard of tomorrow. And if there's no tomorrow, it doesn't matter what you say. No one will remember, and they'll never ask you why.

    But I want to know now, if no one else does. I'll never forgive myself for not going to hold her that first night, when she knelt down in the doorway and cried for only the second time in all the time I'd known her. I just knelt in front of her and tried to use words. There was no tomorrow, and I didn't know any better.

    That must be part of what they mean when they say the world falls apart. What can exist in a universe where time does not? The rest of it must be the hole that is left...

    Maybe if we saw the world as it really was, this wouldn't be so hard. It wouldn't hurt so much, it wouldn't matter. We can only see a very small portion of the world, but we can feel its true size all around us, and maybe that's why we make out our small piece of it to be much bigger than it really is. That's why, when someone dies, half the world is gone.

    It wasn't even my share of it that was broken. None that I had any right to, anyway. But from the minute we got that phone call I became lost. I was adrift and I cursed the tide, cursed every swell and current that didn't carry me closer to her. I was helpless. For four weeks that were and eternity, until at last I saw her lift her face to meet the rain, and I dared to breathe.

    I don't wonder what it would be like if it were my loved one lost, my world shattered. Maybe it would be just more of the same. I might have even less time--just a waking dream of now. Maybe there would be a wailing in my head in place of the feeling like my stomach would cave in. Maybe I wouldn't be able to see the shore. I don't wonder, and I don't ask.

    It's hard not think of memories of pain as being ugly and harmful, no matter how much time has passed. I can't hate what I've learned. Maybe in the future, I'll remember to touch.