march, old poetry and the flow of time

This week, kysove nebe(“pieces of sky” – oh, what a horrible translation) turned 14 – a time that both passed imperceptibly and I can’t believe it has passed. But time and its flow have always been slightly beyond my brain’s understanding. I’m just a little shocked how much, and at the same time, how little some things have changed. I’ve moved cities and countries multiple times, loved with abandon multiple times, gotten hurt, learnt a new language, had time to forget it, and so much more… and somehow I am still that 22yo that doesn’t know what to do with themself at the moments the words are too quiet or too loud.

That’s probably why this March was somehow strange, especially in combination with weeks of bad sleep. I was in Lisbon 6 weeks ago, in Valencia – 4 weeks ago. I count the days and the math checks out. At the same time, whether because of the fact that this spring even the weather in Oslo is sunny and smiling, or because of my fragmented sleep, very recent events seem distant and almost forgotten. (“You are not you when you are well rested” – I repeat to myself the mantra from my student years spent working night shifts.)

February and March passed under the umbrella of a lot of thinking and repeating that we don’t trust (negative) thoughts after 9 pm. I tinkered a bit with visualizing the difference between the sun I grew up with and the one I live with these days. It turns out that at its peak, the difference is just over 3 hours per day.

A year and a half in Norway and counting. People often ask if I’ve gotten used to the cold(and I have), but rarely someone is willing to listen about the quiet persistence of the darkness around here. And I am not talking only about the winter months, no. No, far from that. It’s the steel-grey skies for weeks, it’s the absence of the Sun, it’s the harsh reality of almost forgetting that cloudy and rainy days without a single speck of sunshine is not supposed to be the default, and remembering it only once the Sun graces us with its presence. And you look at the sky, and you wonder how did you manage to forget. Or the days you find yourself content, almost happy even, just because the weather outside might be dark and gloomy, but at least it’s not raining. The most shocking revelation, though, was the realisation that my internal clock, the ability to tell the time of the day by looking up at the skies, has gotten completely thrown out. As someone who grew up about 1700km south from here, spent the better part of their childhood running, playing or brooding outside, I was well versed in knowing the approximate time of the day just by looking up. But 11pm at the end of May or 3pm in the winter here are disorienting, to say the least. And coping with it takes active effort. (The midday winter sun in Oslo is the morning sun of Sofia, and the midnight summer Oslo non-dusk brings the peace of late evening just before it gets dark in the south. At least when it’s not raining constantly.)

I rereading the notes on my phone and all I can think of is that whenever I fly, I get sentimental. (Maybe someday they’ll find their way here.)

Time is weird, for time has always been weird. It’s a concept, an idea, and a threat. It exists, and at the same time, it eludes us, as we have no way to control it. It just is, and we are in it, and it is in us, and there’s no way around it, but forward. And it always goes forward, and never sits still.

I wonder, sometimes, how many people have thought hard about how we could stop it, how we could reverse it, how we could create more of it. But the math is impossible, and all we have is the now.

And time spent with people you love, people who are as close to home as possible, is never enough. And it trickles down and seeps in the cracks, and instead of filling the holes left in your existence by the people you miss, it makes them only wider. It makes the craving for more so much bigger, and the yearning to be close to the people whom you love – much more painful and impossible to describe.

For sometimes time is a sludge we are threading through, and it’s a plane, hollow in its vastness, and it’s both and neither. And the passage of time is simply inescapable.

It’s too easy to get lost in the everyday-ness of things. In the casualness of life happening to you, and you just gliding through the days. Of them slipping away, turning into years with shocking ease

p.s. I am proud of the fact that the visual above was created only by using excel.