Evening ticks by, the sun retreating behind the rolling hills surrounding our small house, which means it is night. Except this answer isn’t good enough for tomorrow’s test.
I’m learning to tell time by memorizing placements on a clockface designed to look like the shifting shadow of a sundial. The numbers are written in cursive like a frightening premonition of what time means—looping as a noose, bleeding imperceptibly from one moment to the next.
Both hands up means midnight, which makes sense because one disappears behind the other like the moon behind a cloud. Straight up and down means halfway. But I can’t keep track of the shapes that mean division, why a quarter is fifteen in time but not money, why half is thirty. Time relies on arbitrary rules, which is why the grownups like it so, tied to the clock so that a tickle fight or a hold-your-breath contest is over if the time insists.
My mother quizzes me and says I can learn time, which I believe because, already at five, memorizing what others expect from me is easy. But Cogsworth is the worst character in Beauty and the Beast, telling everyone when to be, and I don’t want to look at shapes and see responsibilities. Already, the sound of the clock hand lurching forward follows me like an echo, keeps me up at night even though my mother says it’s not that loud and go to sleep.
Time is frustrating, always leaving before I realize. One moment I’m thinking and the next the thought is already gone, even the me in the mirror is gone. It’s hard to hold onto what’s here, like how a dandelion disappears before my lips form a kiss, or a chrysalis bursts open, the moth inside spreading wings to fly up and away like the summer.
I learn that time changes a person. My father is one man early in the morning before the sun comes up, the two of us hugging in front of the heater, talking about growing vegetables and how to hold a hammer, but when the clock hits 5:30 a.m., he’s another, rushing to get out the door and on the road, angry, stressed, already thinking about hours ahead in his day, worrying he will be hours behind in his tasks. My grandmother is different than she was last year, before my mother’s father died, a shadow crumpling in on herself more each month. And the girl I was an hour ago is different than the girl I am now. I miss myself, that girl from an hour ago. But missing yourself doesn’t make sense, so I keep it inside.
I wonder if they had regrets, the ones who divided infinity and called it time.
~
When you watch the second hand on a clock freeze before lurching forward, you exist across time. In other words, time travel is possible.
For a brief second the brain cannot comprehend the construction, resists the method of organization. Time marches forward, the same monotony and rhythm, but our mind creates a false memory of the frozen hand.
Chronostasis—the illusion that chronology stretches backwards—reveals our longing for the past.
~
Tamogotchis are everywhere in middle school, cradled in our hands during math when we learn about angles and remainders, the goal to take what is whole and break it apart. The egg buzzes several times a day as a reminder that survival is not guaranteed.
We pass them around at recess like currency. We clip the Tamagotchis on our backpacks and listen to the plastic eggs click together while we walk through the halls, lockers slamming, bells sounding out the passing of each class and hour.
The game is simple: keep it alive. Except the longer it lives, the harder it is to maintain the creature’s happiness. You have to feed Tamagotchis endlessly, their hunger deep and aching. You have to clean up after all their life mistakes. You have to exercise them and take them outside for fresh air when you are stuck inside in front of a board full of math problems to solve.
I am no good at keeping things alive, no good at responding to the endless buzz of the egg’s timed reminders. My eyes are outside on clouds that look like trains rushing elsewhere, that undulate like the jellyfish that fascinate me at the aquarium, their bodies billowing and bursting. I’m always rolling in the grass tracing the blades with my fingertips, finding roly-polies to wander the length of my life lines. When they get to the end, the roly-polies fall, and I wonder what it’s like to wander from the prescribed narrative, to plummet free from time.
I forget time at the ocean, the tides past and present at once, waves erasing their own existence, a seashell to my ear like a song. Except it’s not the ocean I hear but the sound of my heartbeat, a reminder that long ago before eons and hours, I came from the sea.
I forget when my father and I dig in my treasure hole, plucking quartz and old pennies from deep inside the earth, or when we wander through new construction, the skeletons of houses we can never afford casting shadows in the sunlight. My shadow stretches long ahead, a version of myself unafraid to slant unexpected, to claim the unknown.
I forget time when my parents whisper at night about late bills or I try to sleep alone, afraid of fire and the ghosts that haunt our family, make them drink too much.
Tamagotchis remind me that time is a scolding. I’ve always missed the past or am worrying over the future. Even when I do what I’m supposed to do in the present, I have to keep doing it forever to avoid failure’s looming shadow.
Time after time, I let my creature die, the little ghost of itself hovering on-screen. It’s supposed to be a shame, a sign I have failed the game. But the ghost looks buoyant, boundless. It looks free.
~
When our teacher says it is impossible to escape time, I make the clock bleed.
I don’t mean to spite her—it’s just that the clock is pushing in like the walls, like how there is a right way to sit and raise your hand and read a book. Time is a rule like hurry, like sorry, like quiet.
I am exhausted by time before it has begun, am only interested if it’s to think about how I am different with each grain that falls through the hourglass on the teacher’s desk during timed tests, except this is not a quiz question, not on the standardized state test and no, no Sarah Fawn, no one will ask if a tree knows it’s aging, knows it rings around its previous selves, knows if the time at the surface is the same as at the root.
It’s not so difficult, injuring time. Simply press your nail to the screen of an LCD clock and watch the numbers blur. Pixels shift precise at first, sharp fractal and edge, but then pressure breaks boundaries and the shapes go soft and squiggle, like liquid, like escape.
The teacher says stop before it is too late. I say watch me split. I press harder until now becomes then.
~
The invention of the pendulum clock in 1656 erased time.
Until then, clock accuracy averaged a deviation of fifteen minutes a day, as though it were possible to live across memory and history.
Fifteen minutes a day is a significant portion of the mayfly’s 24-hour lifespan after they emerge from water nymphs to fly to the sky. Fifteen minutes a day of meditation can recircuit neural networks in the brain. Fifteen minutes of sunshine is enough to maintain the vitamin D levels that keep you happy. In 1968, Andy Warhol predicted, “In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes.” In fifteen minutes you can walk a mile or sleep with your lover. Songs like Elton John’s “Your Song,” REM’s “Losing My Religion,” and Queen’s “Crazy Little Thing Called Love” were written in fifteen minutes.
With the clock’s invention, however—a swinging weight around its neck—the accuracy of clocks improved. The deviation shrunk to a mere fifteen seconds a day.
But a pendulum clock can only keep time if it is still, motionless. It can only track the movement of the world if it doesn’t move at all.
In contrast, many contemporary clocks are accurate enough to keep time for twenty million years. They will not gain or lose a second. The Cryogenic Sapphire Oscillator, which ticks ten billion times per second, will keep accurate time for forty million years. The strontium clock can keep time without losing a second for some five billion years, and advancements on the strontium clock suggest it will keep time for ninety billion years.
Maintained since 1947, the Doomsday Clock records scientists’ predictions that the world will end in human-made global catastrophe. Humanity uses the clock to measure time in metaphor. In this way we cease to exist at all—looking to future suffering as payment for the past.
The clock’s original 1947 setting was seven minutes to midnight—our inevitable destruction. Since then, it has been set backward and forward twenty-four times, waxing and waning like the moon. After the Cold War, scientists optimistically moved the clock seventeen minutes away from midnight in 1991. Now, however, we creep ever closer due to climate change as the clock jumped to only 100 seconds until midnight in 2020.
Listen closely and you will hear the sound of the seconds like a terrible metronome marching you towards the inevitable. Your frantic heartbeat slows. This means time is slipping away.
~
As a child I lie in bed, worrying about time. It is running out, which means I am already dying, am a fearful ghost haunting my own room, my chance at sleep slipping from my fingers like sand, the next day destined to be a blur, dreamlike without the watercolor and whimsy.
I do not like clocks that make sounds. Even the eyelash hand of a watch buried deep in my closet is enough to wake me. I do not like the turning gold clock on my father’s desk, the way it spins like a carousel. I do not like windup clocks that require my effort and time only to tell me it has passed. I do not like the green glow of the digital clock on the wall like a wrong moon. I turn and turn, away from the sound or the glow, my body twisted as if trying to run backwards.
At sleepovers the loneliness creeps in when the lights go out and I can hear the clock over the sound of my friends breathing. I bury myself in my sleeping bag to drown out the noise but all I hear is the sound of my heartbeat, a clock I can’t escape.
At recess my friends collect quarters to call POPCORN to ask the time and I think why bother because it is already gone after the receptionist delivers it, gone more by the time your ear hears, further disappeared by the time you register it, hang up the phone to tell your friends.
In science we make clocks out of potatoes and the teacher comments on how accurately we’ve captured time. I do not want a potato clock, do not want time to be mine, instead preferring to put a potato in water in the window and to watch it transform, vine through time, looping to infinity.
The only clock I’m intrigued by is the VCR, which keeps the now when you go back to then. I crave the ability to rewind like I do in my head at night playing over the good and bad parts of my day, favorite memories whose contours begin to blur in my mind until I doubt them altogether. I like repetition, soothed by the way it makes time disappear. I rewatch the same shows, delighted I know what to expect yet always looking for something new. I watch them forward, then send them back. I like the way the machine puts lines through the image, the numbers running backwards, the screeching sound it makes when the narrative will not obey the rules. I like to watch the shining ribbon reel from one side of the tape to the other, the seamless way the story can begin again.
~
In 1748, botanist Carl Linnaeus proposed a garden featuring flowers whose petals opened at particular times of day according to sunlight levels. His flower clock relied on plants’ natural circadian rhythms—those we are now warned to protect from the blue light of our screens. To tell time, Linnaeus theorized, you simply needed to look at nature.
The term “counterclockwise” was invented after the popularization of timepieces. Prior to this, the direction was referred to as “widdershins,” which meant “against the course of the sun.”
Deep inside an East Texas mountain rests a clock taller than the pyramids of Giza. Once a year the clock ticks. The century hand advances every hundred years. The cuckoo comes out each millennium.
Powered by the Earth’s thermal cycles, the clock is free from human design, except that Amazon’s Jeff Bezos is partially responsible for its expensive upkeep. The clock is symbolic, Bezos says, “An icon for long-term thinking.”
Designed to withstand time itself, the clock is expected to tick uninterrupted for 10,000 years, echoing our contemporary concepts of time deep inside the belly of the earth.
~
We are poised to leave middle school and begin high school, poised to leave childhood and begin adulthood, recess and play vanishing like the world will, the news promises, once the new year and millennium strike.
Time exists to mark our living, to measure our survival. But scientists didn’t account for the turn of the century, predictions warn. When 1999 clicks to the new millennium, timekeepers won’t be able to keep up, will grind to a halt, cogs and pendulums frozen without direction.
Without our clocks, time will not exist, and without a way to mark our progress, our survival, what will become of humanity? Around the world, people stock up on food, emergency kits, water, cash. Doomsday preppers stare straight into the camera on the nightly news. Each year we turn to the clock to countdown the passing of time though nothing changes.
The warning pulses through my middle school like a vein. Teachers don’t know how to downplay clocks since their lurching hands order our days. It should be fine, they promise, staring hard at the clock.
When the bell rings at the hour, we all jump.
~
As an adult, I wake to the clock beside my bed. Walking to the kitchen, I spy my phone on the counter, flashing with reminders that have gone off in the night, though I am forever refusing notifications. There is a clock on the microwave, another on the stove, another on the television, everywhere the green glow of time.
Sometimes I put my phone on airplane mode, pretend I’m traveling, free from time for a moment or an hour. Flying is a kind of time travel, departures and arrivals before and after you’ve just been, as though you are living in two times, or, I prefer to think, you are living as two selves, more, existing in multiple in all the various times.
When a plane lands, people turn their phones on at once, scrambling for texts and news alerts and phone calls, the whole plane vibrating with time. I like to leave my phone off, to wonder when and sometimes who I am, and to wander disoriented through the hangar to the arrival and departure screens, surprised when I finally encounter the time, a lovely recognition. When I fly home to California from where I live in Massachusetts, crossing time zones and great distances like a space traveler, I spy Nebraska, another former home, another me in another time. No matter when I am or where I go, I am always halfway from home.
I once spent the transition to Daylight Savings Time in Arizona. I woke early each morning, my body so accustomed to waking hours earlier on the East Coast, and sat in the dark, waiting for the world to start. On this day, time shifted on each coast around me, the usual reminders ringing out on the news. But here the time did not change. I was not before or after, only unbound, unburdened.
~
Two scientists set out flying across the world with four clocks as companion.
They circle the globe fully once, going east. They fly against the sun.
When their 1971 trip is complete, they circle the globe once more, this time heading west, as if trying to outrun sunset, the day’s inevitable end.
The scientists compare clocks when they land. They look at the time they’ve kept in the sky against the time kept on earth and find that time has dilated. Time is only consistent on earth. Nothing is what they expect. The narratives don’t match.
Time only exists if you don’t fly too high, if you keep your feet rooted on the ground.
Sarah Fawn Montgomery is the author of Halfway from Home (Split/Lip Press), Quite Mad: An American Pharma Memoir (The Ohio State University Press), and three poetry chapbooks. She is an Assistant Professor at Bridgewater State University. You can follow her on Twitter at @SF_Montgomery
“Chronostasis” is an excerpt from her forthcoming collection of essays "Halfway from Home” from Split Lip Press. Split Lip Press can be found on Twitter and Instagram.
Photo by Cats Coming