Time is as much a place as the actuality of where your sitting. Seasons embrace this. They flood your senses. The temperature, the taste of the air, the feel of moving through it change as our word hurtles around other worlds, empty or otherwise. I’m not saying anything new here. Time as place is as old as time itself.
One time, I swam blankly in a pool swollen by a roughened neighborhood. The gal responsible for the pool, lived in an ethereal life punctuated by a kind of messiness that attracted the likes of me. There was the pool, and there was her kinked out hair, tight curls of blonde that were as much of a place as anything else. But I didn’t know her. I knew other things, other dimensional restraints because youth was a predicament for me.
After I realized you didn’t need a passport to get to Canada, I went there. I’d already been to Mexico, and, by some weird parental choice, Bermuda. Canada seemed more exotic. Mexico, you skipped a boot heel off the horse and landed wrong, that’s where you were. Canada probably happened that way to some north country folks. To me, it happened in car rides with other people driving, plane trips, circuit series erupting as the descent began.
When I was a kid we spent summer weekends at a marina in the capital. We scraped the pilings of crabs with netted poles and were warned not to dive or wade into the water. But we knew that already. The thick putrid smell of fuel and detritus an alert for even the slowest wit. We threw the crabs back. Time pooled before us like we were made of iron, and it a bath of lightning bursts.
