What comes in has to come out

When my leg hair grows back too fast, I know that I am struggling with my sense of time. My hair grows at a consistent speed, but sometimes, days become minutes, and minutes fade in a single breath, and the only way I know I’m moving through time at all is that my nails keep growing too long and my leg hair needs shaving again.

In county jail, with preciously short time for showers, and a barely functioning razor, I didn’t bother with my legs, but I did shave down the hair on my knuckles. I didn’t have a mirror, or cameras, and I almost never saw myself— except my hands. I liked to look down while I was writing, and feel a sense of well-kept. I learned to bite my nails down in perfect, smooth arches because I wasn’t willing to borrow the communal nail clipper, tethered to the wall in a room made of plexiglass. I didn’t want to look up and feel like I was on the other side of a fish tank, and stare straight into the faces of what pulled the strings of my life.

Time was easy to keep inside, once I got the hang of its slow molasses. I didn’t know the day or date, the names or the numbers of it, but it felt painfully metered. Doled out to us like food servings.

That’s not to say I miss doing time, only that sometimes a consequence of freedom is letting it slip away, or pass in clots, or slow drip when life is calling for flood.

I have a friend who has an innate sense of the days hours. She can look up at any moment and tell you where we are, how long has passed, how much to go. I like the way she tilts her head to the side as she calculates.

It feels like a captain of a ship measuring the wind. It feels like the city when people look directly into the face of the sky, and take in a deep breath of foreknowledge, and scurry home before the water hits.

I have been thinking a lot about what we know is coming, and what we think is coming, and what we truly understand as it passes. I have been thinking of a lot on how we measure ourselves, and each other, and the world around us.

And why.

I’ve been thinking so much about why.

The other day I asked a friend to imagine that we gave someone 7 rocks, and asked them to cut that pile down by half within a week. To imagine how they might do that. They could weigh rocks, and eliminate as many as necessary to make the pile half as heavy. They could remove 3 or 4 at random. They might decide to remove 3 or 4 of ones that seemed to not match, or maybe the ones that do. And matching might be about color or size or assumed personality. Imagine how carefully they’d examine the 7. How many times they might change their mind.

Now imagine it’s 700,000 rocks. At some point, quantity overwhelms the part of our brains that does the delicate work of examination.

I’ve been thinking a lot about quantity, and time, and what it is to be alive and know that you have more time coming to you. More un-metered time than you can plot or measure or examine.

I’ve been making lists of books to read. I remember being off parole and finally able to drive outside my city limits and go to libraries that had what I wanted. I was unemployed, like now. I came to my roommate’s home, where I didn’t live yet, and read all day long in panels of light that poured through his windows. Blocks out of view was the ocean, and you couldn’t see it, but the light could, and as it ran through the room it was like it was holding fistfuls of fog, and that diffused everything, even time.

Later, I told him I had read too much, and I had a sort of density of overlayed ideas in my brain that kept me from reaching any coherent thought. He said, “Sometimes, you just gotta poop.” and I think he meant what goes in has to come out in some way or another.

I can’t imagine eating the way I take things into my mind right now. I can’t imagine breathing the way I am absorbing the world right now. My body couldn’t handle it, and I keep reminding myself that my brain is in my body, and has shown me its limits before.

I am trying to learn how to examine the signs of myself. To stare at the 7 most important rocks of me and measure them gently.

I can do this, or watch the clock, not both, and that’s why my hair is growing too fast, and why my nails are growing too long.

In the bathroom, I have a pair of really nice nail clippers. But there is tunnel through time right now and it goes in all directions, and I find myself biting tiny archways over every fingertip.