The years go fast but the days go slow
My parents have recently found a watch, tucked away among the detritus of some drawer in their house, and erroneously assumed it belonged to my sister. It’s a Swatch watch, with a lime-green wrist band, and some sort of art deco-style design featured on the face. It is, admittedly, the kind of watch that a young girl might wear, but it was mine from the fourth grade or beyond, enamored as I was by trendy wrist wear—staunch indoctrination tactics handed down by my older and more “stylish” sisters (both of who were responsible for passing on similar fashion faux-pas, like the rolled pant leg and popped shirt collar). And so it was either some act of nostalgia or the leftover predilection for fashions from the young-miss section that has me wearing it around again. The only chink in the plan is that the watch no longer works. I have even gone the lengths of having the battery replaced, producing the paltry wristwatch to the dude at the gazebo in the mall, who looked back at me with the grim determination that the thing was definitely not my own, and invariably belonged to some younger sister or something. He tinkered with it a moment before handing the repaired watch back to me, shaking his head in reverent awe of the metronome-making Swedes, with their inherent time-keeping capabilities, at which point in time I exited the store and it promptly stopped working again. And so now all that I’m left with is the relative sweetness of an awesome wrist adornment, which only keeps time for one minute a day.

It is another day in Info-Systems, the scattered scuttlebutt of a boss’s whereabouts, and not even the pleasant ca-chunk of a stapler going off today. It’s a slow one, too, moving in perfect step with my broken watch. You could even invoke the indie-rock icons and recite the line, the years go fast but the days go so slow, but in doing so you would also be invoking your own inevitable passage through time, like some kind of slowly drifting glacier being filmed in stop motion, and wrapped up in all of that would be your really bad taste in music, marked with the historical footnote of a time when things might have meant something.

A couple of weeks ago I had a conversation with a friend who knows someone who’s having a child. We talked about the feeling the announcement of a marriage or child creates in me. “It’s weird because what is a definitional life-moment for these people always elicits in me the utmost in depressive feelings,” I said to her. Thinking it over a moment, I added to what should not have been added to. “The whole thing is, is that it seems to symbolize the end of Options,” I said. “And I don’t think people shold be making that kind of commitment at such a young age.” “Well, you’re not that young,” she reminded me. “You’ve really only got a few years to get your shit together, because if you don’t work it out soon, everyone in your age bracket is going to be married and moved on, within five years.” I started, taking this new information in, falling away then from the old perspective of a 14 year-old girl. For some reason I had never contemplated this before. My life is on par with the average teenager’s, and that includes a self-imposed curfew. But man: time really is running out, I realized, the unambiguous tinge of paranoia creeping in around the edges. “—I guess I never thought about it like that before,” I said to her. “Well, you should,” she admonished, “because there’s not much time left.” In the distance I could hear the audible clunk of a door being shut, punctuated by the sound of a deadbolt lock. I wondered how long I would continue maximizing my options, or whatever. The indie-rockers had it right, in the end. But it didn’t really seem like it mattered much: my wristwatch was totally broken, and it didn’t really seem to be impressing anyone anyway.