Chapter 68 — In Seattle
The Curve of Time, Chapter 68 —— In Seattle, in which Molly returns to Seattle from her yoga retreat.
Followed by musings about the passage of time that we don’t see.
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— 68 —
In Seattle
Returning home from the meditation retreat in Santa Cruz, Molly felt the world slow as she sat in the back of her taxi from SEATAC. At first, she thought it was merely the weariness of travel. But the rain fell unnaturally gradually and the taxi was at a crawl. The crawl of the taxi wouldn’t have been so surprising, except that the cars around her were all crawling too, in spite of the multiple car-lengths between them. Even more bizarrely, her cab sent an incongruous great tidal wave of water as it slowly sliced through the puddles in the gutters.
The fugue of her dream state lasted an eternity, and yet it wasn’t long enough to make sense of what was happening.
∞
At his ride’s house, the driver returned to the front of his car, after having extricated and handed off Molly’s luggage at the trunk. As he reached for the handle on his door he saw, through the windows of his car, a weird optical illusion.
His passenger appeared at the door of her building before she got there. She then stumbled back into herself. Momentarily she vanished altogether and then reappeared, crossing to the door. And then she was gone again.
The driver stood upright. Squinted over the roof of his car, through the rain, at the door and the empty path leading to it. Could his ride really have crossed to it so fast? Obviously! Because it had happened. The glass door to the red brick building was closed and the woman was nowhere to be seen. He wiped the precipitation from his eyes and climbed back into his vehicle.
∞
Moments earlier, Molly had collapsed through the entryway. Her body screaming in pain. As if a million shards of glass had torn through her flesh. On the floor of her foyer she writhed like a worm covered in salt, inside and out. But, whatever else was the case, time was moving normally again. She’d been yanked out of whatever trance she was in.
Unbeknownst to her, she had briefly slipped back in time, before being jerked back into the normal flow when she inadvertently released her metaphorical foot from the metaphorical clutch. At that moment, her body absorbed the rain that was where she now stood.
The result clouded her mind.
At the edge of consciousness her focus drifted.
Wrestlers talked about water weight——she knew this from her brother, back in high school——it was the weight an athlete needed to lose to make their category. Weight that could simply be sweated out. A human body was, after all, famously 70% water.
But the rain she’d absorbed was stuck inside her. It clogged her body, in unnatural ways, like accumulated gunk in the pipes of an old car, only this gunk had been forced into the steel of the engine block——her muscles.
Was she in the throws of an aneurism? Internal bleeding? Blood time— another of her brother’s wrestling terms; time taken to stem the flow of blood from a cut—only this blood time wasn’t marked by coagulating red rags and stitches. Moreover, it seemed unlikely she would ever rejoin the fight.
Well, that was chapter 68, Friends, I hope you enjoyed it.
I’ve not a lot of thoughts on the writing of this chapter, but, on a more meta level, like Molly, I’ve just returned from my own trip.
Rejuvenated? Yes. And with an age-old insight to share, or perhaps better said, remind you all of.
My time away from home was a delightful trip down memory lane. Not only was I back to Australia for the first time since before the pandemic, I caught up with some friends I haven’t seen since high school, and some family that I’d not seen so much more recently. In short, my vacation involved all manner of personally anthropological time travel, replete with odd juxtapositions.
And through it, I was reminded that we spend most of our lives as the proverbial frog; gradually boiling, without any awareness that our surroundings are changing. The instantiation of this realization wasn’t always as dramatic in its consequences, but changes over time are definitely more noticeable when we return somewhere at discrete breaks. Continuity conceals change in plain sight.
Sydney harbor, for instance, and the Australian ecosystem more generally are more beautiful than I’d remembered. The birds might have been sparser than they’d exploded to in my mind, but the flora was more ample, indeed more reminiscent of the wetter side of the Hawaiian islands than Southern California. I do wonder if my expectations, based on memories, might have been more affected by the directionality of my previous experiences, and given this time’s travels, how they will change next time I visit.
On the front of friends and familial expectations, I was pleasantly surprised how readily branding of the past was disregarded and I felt accepted as the new me. Though, perhaps so much time had passed that we were all aware of how much we’d changed and, for that reason, were more gracious in leaving room for others to share how they’d changed. Alternatively, it could actually have been that it was long enough that we’d collectively forgotten how it was we’d pigeon-holed the people we were catching up with. The happy exception that I experienced to that rule was a coffee with an old running flame’s mother who used to drive us all over Sydney, to my great joy Kaye declared she would always have been thrilled to have me as a son.
It’s nice to remember how good flattery feels, and I made a note to keep an eye out for ways to pay it forward myself.
Until next week, be kind to someone and keep an eye out for the ripples of joy you’ve seeded.
Cheerio
Rufus
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