apartment, two that tick loudly, two that don’t tick, and three digital ones, all set to slightly different times not on purpose but because achieving such widespread accuracy is tough when you’re twisting hands on faces with no numbers and constantly resetting the one digital clock that runs slow because it’s meant to be connected to DC power.
I was born on Memorial Day weekend, a Sunday. Chicago was clear and warm, perfect for barbecues.
I started wearing a watch as soon as I could tell time. My first watch’s hands had tiny blue faces and names and a story from Swatch: Flik goes quick and Flak stays back. More than two decades later, I worry about time both near and far: how long it’ll take me to walk to my afternoon meeting, how long it’ll take me to fall in love with a yet-unmet man, how long it’ll be before I and this man who doesn’t exist get married. Every time another friend posts a photo on Facebook with her fiancé, her hand on his shoulder so you can see the diamond in iPhone flash, the panic bubbles. My current boyfriend, whom I don’t suspect I’ll marry, tells me I misuse “jealousy” and “envy.”
Sun fell through the windows of the maroon Volkswagen Golf onto my mom, reclined as far as her seat would allow. She was upright enough to see, just before the entrance to the Drive, that traffic was nearly stopped until at least Navy Pier, and upright enough to also see, in the sideview mirror, a canine-unit police cruiser a few cars away. My dad got out to talk to the police. My wife is in labor, he said to the canine-unit man. Follow me closely, the man said. They weaved through the dense traffic all the way south, where they exited, headed briefly west, and reached the hospital, two months early. My mom found the nearest wheelchair and sat in it.
If being late is a sign of self-involvement, then being early should be a sign of selflessness. But it’s not. It too is a kind of self-involvement, a deliberate refusal to measure accurately—and show up on time—because of the egotistical notion that your presence—you being somewhere—is so important that it’s best to err on the side of early.
I used to set my watches early, not to trick myself into being on time, as the chronically late may do, but to have the feeling, any time I looked at my wrist, that I was already early.
Taped in my dad’s baby book are a lock of brown hair, the first tooth he lost. In it are Wisconsin-cursive lists of birthday presents and friends and milestones: walking, talking, adding, bike-riding—each with a date, and every year with a set of height and weight numbers, an upward trajectory that ended at thirteen years old. How much can time hold? How much can data tell us? I do not know how large thirteen-year-old boys should be, so my dad’s 63 inches and 103 pounds are unremarkable—or, rather, remarkable not for their content but for their specificity, for the fact that they exist at all.
In the hospital my mom told the nurse she hadn’t yet gone to Lamaze classes, she didn’t know what she was doing. The nurse told her to pick something physical to focus her gaze on, so my mom looked out the sixth-floor east-facing window and found in the turquoise wide-waled lake a sailboat to stare at. But then it was late-spring evening, and the sailboat disappeared into the reflective black of night over water, and there was no more looking and there was no more waiting: I was born.
So began my fraught relationship with the clock, that device to set and measure against, to check and deny and obsess over, that metaphor for money so weakly stripped of its nonfigurative roots. Always afraid of being late, I started young being early—to the school bus stop right in front of my house, to turn in homework and dotted-line handwriting exercises in kindergarten, where my teacher suggested I would have more luck closing the space between the spine of the lowercase h and its hump if I stopped rushing. But I couldn’t: There was always time to run out of, and the space remained.
I didn’t cry at first. Why isn’t she making any noise? my mom asked. No one answered. They whisked me away. It wasn’t until the next morning that they let my mom hold me.
My mom holds my anxieties: You will have enough time to get everything done, she says, because you always do. Have you ever turned something in late? she asks, and I don’t have to tell her no—all I have to do is look down in defeat, beaten again by my own habits.
From the start I was measured in time: born two months early, crying five minutes late.
In elementary school, being late was called being tardy. You could rack up tardies. Or you could have a pathological problem with the risk of being on time, not even tardy, and dash out the door each morning with the weight of worry in your mouth, and every morning, you, which is to say I, could and would tell my dad, who walked me to school, that it was his fault we were going to be late, only to tell him, when we rounded the last corner and saw the black asphalt and backstop and the tan brick school building I wouldn’t need to be in for another fifteen minutes, that I was sorry, only to do it all again the next day.
Time segments, time builds up.
If being early is being ahead of time, then being early is dwelling in emptiness.
At the airport my dad always used to a buy a newspaper or go to the bathroom right as the plane was about to board. My mom would get upset. I learned to imitate her, and then I learned to be upset on my own. But I didn’t learn to get as nervous at airports as she does. I’m comfortable with an hour buffer: enough time to wait in unexpectedly long lines and still get a snack but not so much time that my butt will go numb from sitting on hard terminal chairs. The one time I almost missed a flight, I got to the gate as people were boarding. I’d convinced the TSA agents to let me cut to the front of the security line only to have my bag searched by hand. They’d found the weathered brick, harvested from my parents’ backyard, that I intended to use as a bookend. We can’t let you bring this on, the man told me. I know you wouldn’t, but you could hit someone with it, he explained. Maybe I wanted to check it? No, I said, I do not want to check my brick—you can keep it. He placed it in a bin below the conveyor belt, and I dashed off to my gate, weaving around rolled suitcases and beeping electric carts, very on time if the place weren’t an airport, where an on-time passenger is considered late and an on-time flight is considered early.
Outside a bar in Barcelona, a man asked my friends and me if any of us had a lighter. We were standing in a circle under a cloud of smoke that rose to a curlicued metal balcony above. A friend handed over a red Bic. The man said thanks, asked if we had the time, and we all turned to each other as he cupped his hand around his cigarette; I could hear his lips against the filter. Eventually the gazes fell on me, the only one with a watch. I thrust my wrist forward and showed him the round white face, unwilling to attempt the math: In Catalan, time is a matter of addition and subtraction. If it’s 1:34, it’s two quarters of two, plus four. Time crumbles and builds around convenient numbers, those upright-minute-hand times on which we agree to meet because they seem less arbitrary than the numbers not divisible by five or ten. Catalan time hovers around itself, as if focusing, the calculations drawing nearer to the exact number, dancing like moths aiming for the light. Telling time in Catalan is like telling time with a watch purposely set wrong: You set it that way because you think the math will be too cumbersome and the purposely wrong time will have its intended effect; you stop looking at clocks in Barcelona, hoping you can live with the relaxed attitude of a place where dinner doesn’t happen till long after the sun has set and the banks close at lunchtime. But the math becomes easier, then it becomes a habit, and the time of everything shifts but remains time, which is, if anything, exact.
If I know I’ll always be early, then why don’t I always leave late?
The future has an end.
A friend and I have been wondering about the passage of time and tall buildings: Does time pass more slowly or more quickly for a person on the top floor? We keep not looking up the answer online. We trace orbits through the air between us with both hands, our elbows the center points around which planets spin.
Lately
