My Short History With Time
About a year ago, I started wearing a watch again. I know, starting off near the end is bad form —an unnecessary slight against a chronology I have only recently begun to make amends with, but at the same time it would be insincere to start with anything but wanton hostility. That's how we met after all and I have never been nearly so quick to forgive as I am to forget. Besides, I am sitting at the end of this story and should not have to make all of the concessions that our second law habitually demands. Time will have to tolerate the occasional barb. Insomnia plagued my teen years before tapering off to an occasional nuisance throughout my early twenties. School-weeks were pockmarked with involuntary, often successive all-nighters and even those times where I did find sleep eventually, it was hard won over the course of hours of lying uselessly in the taunting dark, waiting for a fickle, short-lived oblivion that may or may not decide to come. It often arrived violently and belatedly during class, with little regard for whether I found the current subject boring or not. Most of the time I didn't, and still the glut of built-up melatonin would make habit of breaking through my caffeine-wrought bulwarks at the most inopportune of times. The church of circadianism would not let me enter its sanctum as I meandered through the fragile acyclicity that lay beyond its light. Floating on nine cups of coffee through a world of spectral half-things and alternatingly hoping, fearing and thinking that I would phase through the floor and fall out of the world at any moment. In retrospect my overall functionality back then is frankly astounding, but still I sometimes wonder how much of my blotchy memory of these years can be attributed to just how sleep-deprived I was. Multiple people have told me that I write things which sound like very vivid accounts of psychosis. What they are referencing are in truth very desaturated accounts of not sleeping for five days, but I digress. I experimented with being awake for two-day blocks as a rule, which made finding sleep afterwards more reliable, but better was not the same as good, and I strongly suspect that this worsened the underlying condition while only somewhat alleviating the symptoms as my lack of circadian consistency scraped painfully against social time. I wanted to play the game. For all my talk of how the synced human-sleep rhythm was antiquated in the modern day, how staggering it would take some strain off our infrastructure and increase overall productivity, I am a collectivist at heart and did not wish for my malfunctions to cause trouble for the greater system as others would find it difficult to ignore the sun. I wanted to play, but the rules seemed to shift as unsteadily as the hours even when they were staying perfectly inert. For my graduation present I asked for a watch. A fancy mechanical one with a glass window in the back so as to observe its gold-and-silver innards ticking away in that perfect dance only cogs are capable of. Of course you could only see through that back-window when you were not wearing it, but these choreographies —the rhythmic catch-and-release of an escapement— are not made for constant admiration (though a sleep deprived mind can certainly lose itself in them for hours, which feel interchangeably like days and minutes). It is their hypothetical visibility which counts much more than the practical act. I have no doubt that I wanted a transparent watch so that I could at any moment turn it around and check that the rules were being followed— that time was playing fair when it so rarely seemed to be. Distressingly, it usually was. I have very thin wrists and even at the tightest setting the watch did not sit right, which is as good of a metaphor for the way chronology refused to cling to me as anything else. I brought it to a craftsman to get another hole punched, which came out off-centre and still wasn't tight enough. Having lost trust in his competence I added two more with a very thin drill-bit, which solved the practical but not the figurative problem. It fit by way of elaborate hack-job, and anyone who chose to pay attention could tell. Luckily very few people ever did. After school, my job was briefly to drive around documents at 4 a.m. The timeslot did not fit my lack of rhythm any better, but it also did not fit it any worse and my brain was considerate enough to never attempt falling asleep behind the wheel of a car. An elsewhere-bothersome fear around those four wheeled death devices might have saved me in that regard. The sun would rise, my shift would end and numbers would be used to obtusely categorize moments while some residual fraction of day might or might not decide to happen. Uni was better. Most of my courses did not have attendance requirements and most of them produced sufficient online material as to keep pace. Showing up on time for lab-work twice a week was a comparatively easy task and I could shift my sleep pattern wildly around these anchors to make room. Having understanding flat-mates helped, but so did alcohol, whose ritualistic consumption allowed a fair bit of manual input over when I would pass out. It should not need to be stated that consistent inebriation with the goal of falling asleep is a dangerous pattern one does not necessarily recover from, but the taste of heretofore unknown amounts of control over reality would have left me deaf to such warnings. It worked, which was all I could have thought to ask for at the time. Aside from an opportunity to flex my hard-won skills for productive pernoctation when I simultaneously wrote my thesis and a third of a video game (I only threw up into a hedge once) during my bachelor, time and I had come to an uneasy compromise in which I wasn't following the spirit of the law but carefully heeding its letters. As it so often goes with policy, the watch on my wrist had transformed from a threat into some manner of agreement. Covid did not hit me as hard as it did most. I was already living with my friends and cats and did not have much need for in-person socialization beyond this. All classes were being recorded and hosted online and I was doing time-flexible data-entry and writing-commissions for money, meaning that I had been finally and thoroughly unshackled from circadia once and for all. I do not remember the last day I wore my watch during this time. I had no need to know the hour and without social gatherings I had no need for accessories. Entropy increased steadily as ever, but there was no longer a beat to it. I woke, I worked, I made art and eventually I felt like lying down. Sometimes the sun was up, but this was a passing observation at best and did not have anything to do with anything beyond that. I gradually kicked my alcohol habit without even really noticing. When I left uni to work for my friend's startup, a job with long, but equally flexible hours, I had forgotten about the timepiece as a part of me. My insomnia had slowly healed itself over time with frustratingly little I could plausibly take credit for. I lived regular-ish 20-30 hour cycles with only occasional missed nights. They were semi-nocturnal to ease scheduling with friends in Statesia, and in summer to escape the midday heat through unconsciousness, but the general amount of wakefulness and the length of its bursts would not have made most medical professionals wince, which was a new and rather comfortable state of affairs. It wasn't long into my work when people decided that we had need for headquarters, the chosen location for which ended up being "Germany" in the most general sense. Since no one but me in our international little group had command of the language, the choice for who would go out to scout for houses fell on me and our financier. We travelled, talked to a wide variety of strange rich people who owned and sold properties, and while my partner picked the trusty tech-person uniform of a dark hoodie and sweatpants, I ironed a dress-shirt for the first time in a few years and remembered that I owned a fancy watch somewhere. Appearances, after all, are the only thing that matters more often than not and glamours are generally a good first impulse. The artefact lived in a small box alongside some old and foreign coins under my bed, though in the years of lacking purpose, the inside of its leather strap had sprouted wispy filaments of white mould. Washing and scrubbing removed the fungus well enough, but took the upper layers of leather with it to reveal the fabric beneath. Another scar to mark our drawn out battle of mutual negligence. By luck or composition however, the outside remained entirely unscathed. Both of us are good at glamours.
We got the house. I sat in fancy, glass-walled offices, talking to realtors and notaries (I was offered a cigar at some point!) and no-one could guess at the frayed state of my nerves behind the smile or the chafed state of this time-keeping companion where it clung to my wrist. They did not know that I hadn't slept before the 8am meeting either. I have only rarely worn white button-ups since, but I kept wearing the watch. As my list of alarms and reminders grew and sprawled around me like a vast apparatus needed to puppeteer my limbs towards desirable outcomes, I have continued to wear it. I wore it when I flew to the States for a conference, straying from my native time-zone by more than one hour for the first time in my life and learning with some relief but relatively little surprise that I do not suffer from jet lag. There is little harm to be incurred when deviating from a rhythm that has never managed to hold you. You just try to accommodate the current scheduling constraints. Same as anywhere, same as it ever was. Perhaps we needed the temporal distance to end our squabble, to stop trying to play games before failing miserably, repeatedly and predictably. For all the continued lack of mutual understanding, chronology and I are catching and releasing in harmony these days. The thoughts of the cogs as they turn are hardly a matter that watchmakers would have to loose sleep about.
Friends sometimes bemoan my tendency to interpret real physical things in the world as metaphors directed at me personally, but while this is more of a personal game than true mysticism, I do sometimes find myself confused at how they are managing to not do that. I look at my watch and I boggle at the idea that its perfectly symbolic blemishes and idiosyncrasies could not mean anything.