Prose

It happens quietly, and always the same way. I surface into a room I know, I remember that I am alive, and then I reach for the date and find nothing there. No name for the day. No anchor. Just a body reporting itself, and a world that has apparently gone on without asking me to watch.

That is the moment I understand that time has forgotten me. Not abandoned me. Forgotten me, which is subtler and harder to argue with. Abandonment is an event; it arrives with a date on it. Forgetting is a drift. Somewhere a schedule is being kept, and I am not written into it, and no one thought to mention it.

I want to be precise about what I am doing, because the obvious reading is wrong. I am not running away from time. I am running after it. I run as fast as I ran yesterday, which is the whole of my method, and every day I get exactly close enough to fall behind again by morning. There is no rest built into a pursuit like that, and no finish line either. As much as I would like to forget time, I cannot leave it behind me. You cannot outrun a thing by following it.

So the days stop being distinct. They arrive at the same speed, on the same track, in the same order, and the difference between Tuesday and Saturday becomes a technicality no one can verify. They overlap. They bleed into one another. They intercede for each other. A Tuesday stands in for a Thursday; a Thursday insists it was always Saturday. The week becomes less a sequence than one long day wearing borrowed dates.

Which brings me to the parallel lines, and to the part of the figure I refuse to surrender. Parallel lines do not meet; every schoolroom says so, and the saying is true of every place you can stand. And yet they do meet, at the vanishing point, where the eye stops resolving detail and calls the distance a horizon. They meet at infinity, and only there. My days are parallel in exactly that way: same direction, same spacing, never touching, and all of them converging on a point I can see and cannot reach.

The vanishing point is not a flaw in the drawing. It is where the drawing ends: the place the lines are aiming at, and the place they will not be permitted to arrive. I have made a life in that gap. Every morning I look down the length of it and run.

So when I wake and cannot name the day, I try not to call it losing. To be forgotten by time is not to have stopped. It is only to be moving without a witness, which is what most quiet, ordinary courage looks like from the inside. Time has forgotten me, and I am still here. Forgetting is not the same as ending, however much the two resemble each other at a distance.