minutes taunt me, pale against the easing morning. I’m either afraid I won’t wake up when it goes off or I’m operating according to a slightly faulty internal clock, one so programmed by years of punctuality-induced anxiety it won’t let even the start of the day arrive on time. When I do make it till the alarm, I’m pleased: I’m not impatient for the day to start, but I’m impatient for the night to end. Or I’m impatient to get the next thing started, because the next thing is often all I think about.
Time zones were standardized for railroads. Without common clocks, distance would strand people in time and send trains crashing into one another. Now, getting to the train early means shivering under the heat lamps or shivering in the dripping tunnel, men around me I don’t trust, space to maintain.
If I don’t get married in the next year, then my clock will diverge from my parents’—I won’t get married at the age they did. And if I don’t get married in the next year, then what. Then I’ll fantasize even more about time travel, even more about men, about being younger so the deadline is further away, so the ticking time can keep ticking until—
to match the story, but not all of it. Not the bedrest months, not the months of not being pregnant but wanting to be, not the dead-too-early parents. But the marriage—I wouldn’t mind that.
I still have to say in my head a fake TV promo—“Eight, seven central”—to remember which way the time zones move.
At the wedding of the first of my friends to get married, standing at the front of the church in a blue bridesmaid dress and gold heels, hair in an updo that required twenty-five bobby pins, I wondered what the audience saw when they looked at me.
Yes, I realized, life goes by faster at the top of a building, like at the peak of a panic.
As a kid I’d get to school early, judo practice early, I’d finish standardized tests and reading assignments early, but I wouldn’t, it turns out, finish math tests early. Sitting on a metal chair, plastic desk prone to hand-squeaking holding the stapled exam, sometimes I wouldn’t finish at all. I’d be so nervous about running out of time that I’d run out of time. The sound of pencils, frantic tapped bursts and hurried erasing like fabric rubbed against itself, the four sure lines of a boxed answer like someone announcing “I got it right”—it would all hold me unwriting at that desk, facing so much unlined white paper to be filled in so little time until that time was up.
Time runs like colors, like tights. Time crawls and time passes—not away, in euphemistic death, but by, like passing by a storefront.
Now I yearn for extra time in life, that boring existential desire of a person who has the luxury of worrying about meeting self-imposed life-stage deadlines.
Why, when a friend was waiting to be picked up at the airport by two dude friends, was she not mad when they showed up forty-five minutes later than promised? Why, she asked me, did she tell them it was fine when, had the friends been women, she would’ve been pissed? We blame it on societal expectations, she said. That’s like blaming pain on a bruise: Where did the bruise come from?
A woman needs only to say “I’m late” in a certain tone of voice to convey either fear or hope.
My computer calendar now offers to remind me of an event when I need to leave for it. But that’s much too late: I might not be dressed yet, I might not have decided whether I’m going to walk or take the train. It’s too late because the time at which I need to leave is already too late to leave to be early.
The night I was born, while my mom was in labor, my dad called my grandfather to ask him to take the dog out. Right after, my mom’s doctor showed up, in white pants and a pastel blouse, arriving straight from a Memorial Day barbecue. She hadn’t had time to change.
Because I was born early, there was, until I was eight months old, no place for me on the growth charts. I’d jumped the gun so much that I couldn’t even be counted, and everyone else couldn’t be my context. It was as if I existed in a vacuum in which time was absolute and I was never even early (or late) because there was no one else to show up.
Being late is needing an excuse: I was stuck on the train, the train never came, I spilled a bottle of lotion, I forgot my umbrella. The excuse can be real or fake—it matters only for the one saying it, not the excuser. The trouble comes when a real excuse was in the repository of fake ones, and the late person feels like she’s wasting it when she has to use it as truth.
I was stuck at the hospital for twenty-five days. When my parents took me home, I came with a beige apnea monitor the size of a picnic basket. For three months, an alarm would sound if I stopped breathing or if the wires disconnected. Every day no alarm, the same data, and time was passing, and my parents were growing tired of the testing at home and the testing at the hospital and finally, they said, Enough.
Even then you were early, my mom told me once. She meant impatient.
My first phrase was “not a baby, a girl.” Already I was defining myself in terms of time, on a timeline on which each moment of now passes inexorably from the future into the past, per Aristotle: “Whenever we notice the before and after, then we say that there is time.”
My mom did not worry about me being born early. She wonders now why she didn’t worry more.
It can be too early to tell, too late to make a difference. It can be too early in the morning, too late at night. It can be an early surprise or a late change, an early predictor or a late adjustment.
It can be early days, like when I first embarked on the project of being late more often. I’d sometimes succeed in showing up at the college dining hall after whomever I was meeting, but mostly I’d fail and would still get there first, ticking away time by doing the student-newspaper crossword.
My Sunday paper arrives late Saturday night, and whenever I come home to it and reach down to pick up the puckered blue bag, I like to think I’m time-traveling. But then I feel older, and I remember I’m supposed to be worried about meeting the deadlines of growing up.
For the past week my computer has been unable to open the “Time” Wikipedia page. It spends a few seconds frantically loading and reloading the site before it gives up and goes gray, telling me an error has occurred.
The only rule is time, but really the only rule is expectations.
Inside a spansule of Adderall are tiny beads, and inside each of these is a mix of salts. These salts in spheres in capsules can make a person stay awake. They can also make the restless focused and the focused restless. They give me what I imagine to be a healthy level of alertness, and even when I fall asleep just minutes after taking one, upright on the couch or defeated back in bed, I am glad for them, because it is against this medicine that I measure possibility—of being awake, of being with other people, of being. Because of that measurement, I have something to focus on, always, something to hold my unrelated anxieties. Because of that measurement, I can be sure I’m trying to be productive, and these days, that’s the best you can ask of someone, at least in public.
In the relative private of my friend’s car, driving to Minneapolis along highways flanked by fields both fallow and full, I was getting tired. So I reached into the tiny pants pocket with my pointer and thumb and tweezed out my pocket pill, glanced away from the billboard-free road to look at my friend and make sure she was still reading while I instinctively swished around some spit, and dry-swallowed it. She knew I took the pills, but still, I
