how to bend time

and make life feel long and real

Time flies when you’re having fun, but it doesn’t just disappear. When you are actually being present and having new experiences, it leaves a deep imprint upon your memory.

The real problem with time is not that it flies, it’s that it can leave without a trace. It can feel like it was never there to begin with. It can make us say “I can’t believe it’s already July!” because the months feel like days.

I feel so fiercely aware of the impression that time leaves on me. So much so that I can barely stand the naked feeling of time passing me by quietly. I am ruled by my desire to be pressed by it, even if it ruins me.

Time is a crazy thing. The passing of an experience is the passing of life, meaning we kind of die hundreds of deaths before we actually die. An experience stands before us, it lives, and then it dies. When it changes us, we feel touched by time. When it doesn’t disrupt us, we feel nothing.

I want to feel touched, always.

I am addicted to the feeling of being warped and wrinkled, for pleasure or for pain. I can’t contend with long stretches of time brushing past me politely and that is why I am insane. I can’t stay still.

I just returned from 6 months of living and travelling in Indonesia. I learnt how to scuba dive, ride a motorbike, speak some Indonesian and saw so many sunsets. I never knew what the next day would bring, constantly finding myself in chaos. It was incredible, but it wasn’t all positive.

I went to hospital 3 times. Got lost hiking with no food after dark multiple times. I got bed bugs on my second day. I was attacked by leeches trying to hike up a volcano in the wet season. I got frostbite from freezing my ass off on top of a different volcano. I had a parasite. I fucked up my visa and had to pay someone to bribe the immigration office. You get the picture.

It was wild.

It touched me.

But as all experiences do, I returned and it died. One day I was getting on a plane, now I just have a lot of photos. But it doesn’t really feel like it just flew by, because it knocked me over and left marks all over me. Time was bent. It jutted out and it engraved me.

The way I feel now as I look back on this last 6 months is how I so desperately want to feel at the end of my life. Like I bent time. Like it imprinted on me so deeply that as I trace my mind over the impressions, it almost feels like I’m time travelling. I want to sit there on my deathbed smiling at the fullness of it all. At how 3D my life feels.

The 6 months before I left were fine. My job was fine, my routine (not that I have much of one) was fine. I went out with friends every weekend. I got wine drunk and cried laughing. I went on day trips here and there. I went to some new bars and tried some new recipes. It was absolutely fine, good even.

But it was so much faster. Months crashed into one another.

I look back on photos from that time and find myself going “oh I remember that night”, but I have to think. I have to squint to see the fainter traces of time. I have to squeeze to feel the softer ridges. I still smile, but when I let my muscles relax I feel empty again.

I know I’m being dramatic, but this feeling haunts me. Knowing that if I sit with sameness, no matter how damn pleasant and full of love it is, life feels faster and milder. When I look back on 6 months of sameness and feel unmarred by time, I get so scared of what it could feel like when one day I am looking back on my entire life.

What if I don’t bend time enough. What if there aren’t enough dents and ridges to make an entire life feel vivid and real.

I have spent 2 years of my life travelling. I lived on a donkey farm in Croatia. I worked at a summer camp in Romania. I moved to Germany when I was 19 and got paid to look after and teach English to a disabled child with no experience whatsoever because I was broke in the middle of nowhere in Romania and needed a job. I had to inject him with human growth hormone every night, again, no experience. But hey, I can’t say time wasn’t bending.

Even when I am not travelling, I am constantly seeking anything but sameness. Sometimes it is unavoidable. We need rest. Cultivating real community demands presence. Some goals require routine and stillness.

But god is it surreal to feel time bend.

You don’t need to travel to make life feel slow, I just find it the easiest way to make sure you are experiencing new things. I know people who rarely travel but are still insane. Still chasing the grip of time above all else.

Perhaps it’s unhealthy to be so averse to the quickness of time. Perhaps it’s gluttonous to want to stretch my time no matter what it takes. Maybe it’s part of being young and I won’t need to be so battered by life to feel full the older and wiser I become. But for now I am addicted to the feeling of bending my time.

I have felt kind of crazy for years now, but it is only now that I can put a finger on the source. I thought maybe I was just a slightly manic person, but no.

I just want my life to feel slow. To be a bumpy and confusing mosaic of small deaths. A jagged shrine.

I want to bend time.

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