On Timing

I am again in Manila. The packers emptied my apartment, and because this is how things go here, I had a beer with them when all was done.

One of them slit his leg on a beer bottle by accident. The blood was dark over the concrete floor, and I noticed he was bleeding maroon and was afraid the shard cut a vein. I bound the gash, knowing that it needed stitches, knowing that there's only so much blood a body could lose, knowing that the gash might be infected, knowing that he won't have it stitched no matter what I say. This is sometimes how things go here as well. Maybe it will heal on its own.

Now I am here in the apartment in the capital, briefly wondered about that boy's wound and then forgot about it for all the shit that I need to move in. Anyone familiar to packing up is privy to the sheer saturating feeling of looking at a mess of boxes and bags and the near-detritus that make up their lives, and of how to reorder these so as to resemble a sense of sense. I looked at all of them on the dirty floor, knowing that I had to somehow start unpacking, knowing that there is a finite number of boxes, knowing that I at the very least have to make a decent bed in a place where normalcy is far from coming. This is sometimes how things go. Maybe they will normalize on their own.

This is how things go in and with time. You get wounds from random beer bottles getting caught in your ripped jeans. You get bound. The wound will end one way or another. If you survive, then you get another wound, maybe from another beer bottle, maybe from an angle grinder, maybe from a woman.

You move. You unpack boxes. You make a bed and lay in it. The day will end one way or another. If you wake up, then you get another day, and maybe another, and maybe another, until you don't.

This is how things go in and with time. You just get tiny bits of it. It is every drip of blood, and it is every thing unpacked. Time is that which grinds you, and it is that which grounds you. There are places to go to, and there are wounds to be had, because time is timing. There are places to leave, and there are wounds to stop. Time is the verb that makes all verbs be, being itself a verb.

But for you to even bleed or go places, you have to slice time so thinly that now doesn't matter. That is the only way you become capable of any one thing, one after the other. And being capable of any one thing in a time sliced so thinly, the far future will simultaneously hurt with hope, not happen in a proper now, and cannot but happen in a lifetime that's all that is ever going to happen.

That is how how things go in and with time. You don't just get tiny bits of it rendering you agency; you get an entirety of it rendering you mortal.