Time and the Anarchy of Hope

1. What the Water Wants

The 2006 hurricane season was predicted by the National Weather Service to be one of the worst we've seen yet.

Each storm, as it has been named, has worsened, and as it approached land, has lessened and waned. As we work up to prepare ourselves for each intense happening, which we are sure is imminent, the headlines grow less cautionary, more informational. They are minor blips scrolling along the bottom of the screen --and instead of emergencies , we find ourselves only here with anniversaries.

I remember: where I was. And it feels like this: where I am not anymore. I'm reminded of the way, the way things tend to change, first with a feeling--a shift in perception; a slight alteration of shape, and the slow glow until it begins, it begins, it begins to illuminate.


2. On Business, Finished

Dear You,

Regarding the matter with which you feel is unsettled, I can only tell you this.

There is one train. There are many stations.

And why is it, you keep asking me, that we cannot be friends? Aren't we friends?



3. Occultation

I know I’ve told you this story before—the one about the designer one of my ex-boyfriends took me to see. He was giving a lecture; in it he explained how this magazine had hired him to oversee the execution of a change in size format. They were changing the size of the magazine to a smaller format, and how he chose to approach the project was to release an issue printed on the larger paper, only with a strip of white space at the top of every page. That way the readers could get used to everything in the magazine being smaller. I thought it was such a brilliant idea at the time, but I think I am only now realizing why: it is not that often in our lives that we get the opportunity to prepare ourselves to get used to the empty space we are about to be experiencing.

There is an immense sky that planetary bodies inhabit. They are circling; an endless rotation, a cycling—a movement always happening. Occasionally, their paths are crossing—the paths of stars and moons, or moons and planets. Because we only know what we see, and all we see is the light that these planetary bodies are emitting, to the observer it looks as though they are disappearing. This is known as occultation.

I don’t think there is much that can prepare you for empty space, even countless hours of waiting for it. Even when you predicted it—when you mapped out the stars, when you spent late nights studying and measuring planets and possibilities, when you’ve assessed risks and known what you would be losing—there is the emptiness of the empty that still strikes you as unexpected when you expected it, when you thought you knew how to handle it. Sends you scrambling to recalculate formulas, review data sheet after data sheet, and find there is no impossibility in what you feel sure must be, impossibility.

Maybe you are right. Maybe we are like the stars. Maybe we are fumbling along determined paths of rotation, passing each other at either the right or the wrong time, and, at times, only momentarily, getting lost in one another's shadows.