The fact that I have written mainly about time for the latter part of last year, and not just about it but the passage of it, is not unfounded. I noticed this tendency a while back, and if you have read any of these bookmarks, these pieces, even with significant gaps between them, I reckon you would have noticed this, too.
Why did I not interrupt it if I were aware of this repetition? Because writing correctly about a subject is a game of practice. We must obsessively try our hand at it, over and over, and if we are lucky, and if we are good, only then do we get to capture it. What people call theme is simply a writer’s valiant attempts to write about something banal. Some spend their lives writing about the same thing, and then, someday, they write but a sentence, and it captures everything they have written about it before.
For now, in this fresh beginning where we all must make some changes, I believe I am tired of writing about time, and I shall slowly turn my eyes towards other things. The ticking of the clock is so well positioned in the middle of my head that even if I do nothing in a day, I feel time passing, and if a day is so full I barely get a chance to breathe, I feel it passing still. This awareness is not your run-of-the-mill inkling where someone knows that days get on, and so do lives. It is that of a librarian who keeps a meticulous record of where each book is kept. That is how I have kept my hours for all these months.
The other day, a friend told me they are trying something new as part of the annual mimetic shenanigans. Will you change something, then? They asked me once they walked me through their list of changes. I think I wish to spend a day without feeling time passing. I thought this, but I did not say anything. All I knew was that it was imperative I do this now. Sometimes, you just know.