Monday Girl
Last night I was out with a few writers. One of them said: past, present, future. You can only pick two. Which two tenses do you live in?
⦿
It was the last day of the quarter and for me, the last official day of the Stegner. The farewell party concluded, the open bar closed. I’ve always had a troubled relationship with time, but upon moving to California two years ago, I was determined to wrestle it into submission. I refused to let time slip away from me again. I stuck two rows of Post-its above my new desk, one square for every month of my visa. Every time I sat at my desk to write, I was literally watching the time on my visa run down. Reader, let me tell you, it lit a real fire under my ass.
There’s just one Post-it left now, a yolky 3 by 3 square marked June. I remember writing the months out in thick black Sharpie, believing I would never reach this moment, knowing it was coming anyway.
⦿
We all invent our own containers, myths about time. Or are there people who trust that they’re aligned, cellularly, with the natural flow of time? Who never behold each second, each minute passing with a kind of suspicious wonder? If there are, I don’t know them. Personally, I’d describe my relationship to time, in a word, as puddly. During the pandemic’s early days, I spent so many hours staring at the clock’s second-hand tick. I understood objectively that there were sixty seconds to a minute. I probably agreed that there were sixty minutes to an hour. I could not, however, make the connection between that and the hours vanishing, the days, full months. Years.
The night before I left America for the first time, I was standing outside Gauraa and Elliot’s street-level apartment as they leaned, masked, out of their window. Six feet apart, give or take.
I can’t believe it, Gauraa said, I can’t believe you have to leave.
I’m going to be back so soon, I told her. They say you just have to ride it out for 14 days.
The next time I was back in America it was 18 months later.
⦿
Reader, do you remember when you lost faith in the container of 14 days? A couple of months into the pandemic I was still horizontal and directionless but Gauraa and Elliot had already begun incubating the magazine. No Contact was born. I wasn’t yet involved. Gauraa and I were texting, making playlists, crying a lot. Mostly individually, then reporting it to each other later. Have you cried today yet? What is “today”? Are you crying later? The promised 14 days had come and gone multiple times. The horizon of hope kept inching further away.
Time is puddle, I said, once.
She replied: The magazine helps me keep a sense of time.
I don’t think we’ve mentioned this yet but The Remote Viewer’s working title was No Contact Daily. A different column published for every day of the week. Some time later, when I agreed to be a columnist, Gauraa texted: You’re Monday girl!
What is a day. What is a week. In creating her system of narrative, her structured containers of time, Gauraa wove me back into a temporal reality too. I felt the time chromosomes within me begin to tick again.
⦿
The December before I left New York for the second time, Gauraa sent me her novel manuscript. In the novel, the narrator documents her interior life concurrent to her material reality in a series of crystalline iPhone notes, each line stamped with date and time. In these temporal dispatches, a life accrued. I tore through the book in a couple of hours and re-read it at various points after Gauraa died.
What can I say about death that hasn’t been said before? It stopped time.
What can I say about a book that hasn’t been said before? It was a refuge from time.
⦿
The first time I moved to New York it was for my MFA. I was already working on my novel but couldn’t understand how to account for fictional time passing, nor for its elasticity when filtered through narratorial experience. I couldn’t account for it in my own life either. But I was there to figure it out. In a seminar on time and place, my first month in New York, a professor asked what our favorite time period in history was. I’ve never been quick on my feet, when he pointed to me I blurted: right now.
I remember Gauraa looking at me in total disbelief, like, wild.
That was the first time the three of us met. I don’t remember her answer, nor Elliot’s. I was sitting there, stuck two minutes in the past, wondering what I would have said differently if only I had a second more to think about my answer, as the rest of the room moved on.
⦿
Often I don’t believe that Gauraa is dead. In my more stubborn moments I think: why should I? In choosing between tenses, let the past be my present. Let all three tenses collaborate in my experience of our world.
⦿
I’m still obsessed with time. Last quarter, every time I taught, I’d make my students identify the story’s narrative perch, their psychological present, and explain to me how it’s working. The story I keep coming back to is Ted Chiang’s Story of Your Life. If you haven’t read it, it’s about aliens, language, and time. It’s not just the way time works, plot-wise. It’s the temporal chromosome baked into each sentence, the ways in which syntax is oriented to the future and to the past. With each section and sentence, the narratorial consciousness is patterned with her tenses clashing and collaborating. We live in the past but we’re still oriented toward the future, even with foreknowledge, even with prescience of loss. That’s something you can really only do on the page. The movie adaptation, Arrival, doesn’t even come close. Still, when I left the theatre, there wasn’t a dry eye. And no matter how many times I read the story, it is the same for me.
⦿
A couple of months ago, we decided this issue of No Contact would be its last. In preparing for this last goodbye I found myself reading over the magazine from its inception. It didn’t feel like a snapshot of our past, it felt like being back in its present. There is a way, I’m learning, that the accrual of words, the temporal deposits of consciousness on a page, is a slow and continual shattering of our existing relationship to time, a constant making of new myth. And in doing so, our relationship to endings are altered. Or at least mine is.
Past, present, future. Which two tenses do you live in?
When are you asking the question, and from when do you answer?
I wept so much when leaving New York. I thought I would cry when leaving California too. But I feel alright. I miss my friend, in the continual present, yet the act of missing renews her presence. I know that the magazine will stay here, immortalized digitally, and that I can return to this time with a click of the mouse.
Still, I don’t want to take the last Post-it down. I put the record on, and let it play again.
