A Nostalgic Essay on Time

From the roof, we could see where we met--in a tiny, colorless classroom fifty yards down and across. It was a math theory class, taught by an old woman who resembled a turtle. I'd thought he was cute. When we introduced ourselves, neither of us could have guessed the stream of events that would span six years after that, or how many of our friends and family would be affected by that moment. No one could have told me that at three in the morning, six years after, that he and I would be sitting on the roof of the old fieldhouse trying to make sense of the fact that if we'd never met, my sister wouldn't have a two-year-old son, and we might have found completely different ways to become adults.

A full moon hung in the sky. The Mississippi Bridge glowed hazy, riddled with late-night travelers and early commuters. Years ago, I had moved to this city from the other direction, and so had he. Sometime soon, I thought, we'll both be leaving this city by way of that bridge. He'll go one way, and I'll go the other, and that might be the end. The network we've built over what feels like most of our lives, even though it's been only six years, will fall to pieces without us. Or maybe so much has happened that it will continue to thrive without us. I don't know which hurts more.

My life has a history of extraordinarily long chapters, and sometimes I leave the book open for too long. That's what happens, you know, when you stick around for too long, testing how much dust and cat hair it can hold before you're forced to turn the page. Pretty soon, your beautiful chapter looks more like your parents' attic, or your grandma's knick-knack shelf--it never changes, and you eventually forget it's there, until a rusty nail gives out and you have a pile of broken ceramic dwarves on your floor.

Or maybe it'll be one of those projects that you think is brilliant at first--the ones that wake you up in the middle of a dream--but you can't finish it, because you don't know enough yet. But when that day comes, you pick up the unfinished chapter, blow off the dust and realize you know how it ends. When you start to write, it doesn't even look like your own handwriting anymore. Then you remember that the person who started it couldn't be the one to finish it. And you smile, because you kind of always knew that.

An old drinking buddy once told me that life can only be lived forward, but can only be understood in reverse. I began to drink more because I thought he'd discovered a way to get drunk enough to time-travel, and that sounded way fun. The fucker always had a drink in his hand, but not because drinking made his life reel backwards. He merely understood what he was saying.

And he never bothered to explain what it meant. I suppose one can't describe the fourth dimension unless you're sitting on the roof of a period in your life, looking down and across at every building you've ever drafted, as every person you've ever affected enters and leaves at different times, and continue to do so long after you stop looking.

And to our left was a wide, wide river, with only one bridge across, and the light glowed hazy. The commuters buzzed by, continuing on to the event horizon. It might have been Port Allen on the other side, but we couldn't tell from there. He threw a handful of rocks off the side of the fieldhouse; they hit the steel awning four stories below us, and each made its own pitch upon impact. Shortly after that, we climbed the stairs back to the ground. I suppose it's there that we belong.