bad metaphor

Flash back to December 31st, 2006. My blood tingled with a mixture of anticipation and the buzz from a bottle of wine I had shared with my friend Louise. We’re at the Replay with a boy I like, and a lot of other people I don’t know but don’t care that I don’t know, as we share a sense of kindred drunkenness. “FREE CHAMPAGNE!” I hear someone yell, plucked miraculously out of the cacophany of revels. I turn around to see that on the table behind me, someone has set a tray bearing sparkling chinet glasses. I lean over, my movements liquid as I reach out for a glass and bring it towards my face.

Next moment – total darkness – where am I – oh, this is my bed – I’m in pajamas but backwards. I’ve traveled through time. I flip on the light and look around me, to discover in dismay that my purse did not make the journey with me. Louise, who did, informs me that the boy I like has been dispatched to rescue my belongings. I’m eternally grateful, bewildered but lucky to have such reliable companions.

I haven’t had a New Year’s quite as, ahem, extravagant as that night since, but every now and then I do have that odd sensation of having been hurtled into the future, without quite realizing how I got there. We’re now in a new decade, and my brain still thinks it is 2008, and only yesterday was I pinning Obama flyers to people’s door handles in Kansas City suburbs.

Sometimes I sit at my desk at work, in a quiet little office in a basement on the hill, and feel the sensation of the world flowing past me at a frenetic pace. I see people leave, wish them goodbye, blink and the next minute they are back from their travels, grizzled and world weary. It kind of reminds me of that story of twin astronauts I read about in a science textbook in high school, attempting to explain to us kids the idea of relativity. One twin in the story jets off in a shuttle, travels the galaxy, and comes back in what seems like a few minutes to him. Upon stepping off the shuttle, he is shocked to find that his twin suddenly looks much older. To the twin that stayed behind, the traveling brother has been away for many years.

When I get this way, I am tempted to shut my eyes and wish the world would slow down for a minute, stop changing so rapidly. I don’t want to be left behind, but I also don’t particularly feel like getting up just now and running to keep pace. When on study abroad in England, I felt happiest when I spent my fifteen minutes of free time sitting in a beautiful meadow in the midst of a ruined abbey, and saddest when the professors rounded us up to get back on the bus and see more sights.

Yes, this makes me sound supremely lazy and possibly stoner-like. I could be doing a lot more useful things with my life, than sitting in some dumb patch of grass. Or gathering moss in my basement office. And I would actually like the chance to put these neurons towards more engaging activity than entering data, or surfing the web endlessly.

But I do like that right now, I get to relax and bullshit with my closest friends, pretty much whenever I want. I can watch stock simmer for hours. I want to loaf at my ease, observing a spear of summer grass – or wintry icicle, as is the case right now. I hoard those moments in which I can sneak away to do absolutely nothing.

It’s the little nothings that keep pulling me back.