Seconds

I never have enough time. Not for everything I have to do, want to do, don’t want to do.

The last book I read, I picked up at 11 PM, after none of my friends were free for video games. I expected to read a chapter or two before I became restless and bored all over again. From the slowly multiplying pile on the floor beside my bed, I chose 56 Days, Catherine Ryan Howard, a thriller in a romance’s skin. It was darkly intricate, hypnotic, brimming with twists and turns that always swerved just left of what I imagined was going to happen. I’d highly recommend it to true crime lovers, to twisted romance lovers—to anyone, if I’m being honest.

But I’m getting off track.

I never have enough time to read. I finished 56 Days by 2AM the same day I began it, an ill-advised Sunday venture that cut into my precious sleep when I was already dreading a luncheon event at 12PM that Monday. But I couldn’t let the time slip through my fingers. I clutched it, white-knuckled, eyes burning as I scanned each page and devoured the thrilling tale, reminding myself with each passing hour that I didn’t need a full eight hours, or even six.

This kind of mathematical self-sabotage is the only way I seem to operate anymore. I’m not sure when it began, but I feel as if it was after college—which is amusing, I think, given that I only attempted an all-nighter once during college and promptly decided it was not for me. Most people I’ve spoken to talk about how awful their schedules were in college, from eating to sleeping, and I’ve always hummed a vague noise of understanding in response. Sure, I took almost 17 credit hours each semester and filled up every space with working part-time as a tutor for the university, but it never felt awful. There were mornings when I woke up feeling like lukewarm microwaved macaroni, but I didn’t feel like I was falling apart at the seams.

Sometime between moving to California and COVID happening, I began to unravel. Some part of my psyche hit the ground like a bobbin, and its metallic trill haunts me late nights or early mornings as I try to gather up the thread whipping around my ankles. I’m not even sure how much of it I’m tangled up in anymore. It feels like a sinking ship a lot of times, but I’m not the hysteric cabin boy darting around the decks, tossing pails of water over the side. I’m the captain, stoic at the helm, almost outwardly appearing to deny the reality of the sinking. In truth, I’m mostly holding it together by sheer force of will, by the haunting echo of a cliché reminding me the captain goes down with his ship.

I have no sense of time. Everything blurs together, moves too fast. Moves too slow, if it’s a work luncheon or an event I don’t want to be at. Then time freezes exactly when it shouldn’t, when I’m thinking about how much I’ve disappointed my family by not going to that graduation, that Thanksgiving, that get-together. Time is a construct. Whatever. I live this experience, and everything is time, and there’s never enough of it. There’s never enough and I’ve spent the rest all wrong.

I should have spent that time in college working on more classes. I should have spent that time in Texas instead of California, getting my degree even if it was at a university I didn’t like as much. I should have spent that time I play games on writing instead. All this time I haven’t spent properly.

Even now, what am I doing? Writing something that doesn’t matter to anyone, that won’t get me a place on a publisher’s roster? A blog post. A blog post that someone with real struggles will look at and laugh at—no, scoff—and wonder if I’ve ever really had a struggle in my life.

I’m not sure anyone knows what they’re doing, but I don’t have to live as anyone. I have to live as myself. And I know I don’t know what I’m doing. I’ve always known what I want. I know what I would be doing right now, if I was guaranteed the minimum requirements in life. If I didn’t have to work.

But life is counted in hours I have to report on my time sheet, hours I must protect from my employer because life isn’t nine-to-five. Life is counted in seconds spent waiting at red lights, thirty minutes off your life for a hot dog, don’t you know, all these clock faces with jagged smiles spinning hypnotically while I try to squeeze every last breath from the day. If I could, I wouldn’t sleep. Wouldn’t eat. I’d exist without needing those obstacles, have that many more minutes and hours. But my body needs food and exercise and a few hours of sleep before I start hallucinating and burning like an overheated laptop. It needs things that make me frustrated, make me want to cry hot tears of anger.

If all I have is seconds, and I’m never published or known or noticed, then it doesn’t matter. I’ll spend them on these entries that almost no one will read because it’s the only form of therapy that is accessible to me right now, and it’s a damn sight easier than sobbing at my desk while Citibank pretends for the 4th month in a row that they fucked up my fraud case accidentally, I’m so sorry about that, we’ll open it again…

What else is left to me? I’ve always prided myself on surviving. I survived major surgery, I survived alone in another state, I survived disappointment and expectations and all the milestones where I could’ve waded into the Atlantic Ocean and burst into seafoam like the mermaid that loved the wrong sailor. But I’m not beautiful enough to be a mermaid, and I’m back on the Gulf Coast, so I’d probably just wash up like the smelly seaweed that clots along the shores of South Padre Island. And I’m not doing that.

So here’s to the unspent seconds, the ill-spent seconds, and the seconds I probably shouldn’t have had but ate anyway, middle finger stabbing upwards toward the idea of some omniscient being judging me for finding peace in a little extra pasta. I’ll stay up till 3AM reading another thriller or 4AM watching another episode of Yellowjackets. I’ll do whatever the fuck I want because I’m tied up in thread like some kind of drunk spider, and you know what?

It’s only a prison if you don’t treat it like a hammock.