sixth-floor east-facing window and found in the turquoise wide-waled lake a sailboat to stare at. But then it was late-spring evening, and the sailboat disappeared into the reflective black of night over water, and there was no more looking and there was no more waiting: I was born.
So began my fraught relationship with the clock, that device to set and measure against, to check and deny and obsess over, that metaphor for money so weakly stripped of its nonfigurative roots. Always afraid of being late, I started young being early—to the school bus stop right in front of my house, to turn in homework and dotted-line handwriting exercises in kindergarten, where my teacher suggested I would have more luck closing the space between the spine of the lowercase h and its hump if I stopped rushing. But I couldn’t: There was always time to run out of, and the space remained.
I didn’t cry at first. Why isn’t she making any noise? my mom asked. No one answered. They whisked me away. It wasn’t until the next morning that they let my mom hold me.
My mom holds my anxieties: You will have enough time to get everything done, she says, because you always do. Have you ever turned something in late? she asks, and I don’t have to tell her no—all I have to do is look down in defeat, beaten again by my own habits.
From the start I was measured in time: born two months early, crying five minutes late.
In elementary school, being late was called being tardy. You could rack up tardies. Or you could have a pathological problem with the risk of being on time, not even tardy, and dash out the door each morning with the weight of worry in your mouth, and every morning, you, which is to say I, could and would tell my dad, who walked me to school, that it was his fault we were going to be late, only to tell him, when we rounded the last corner and saw the black asphalt and backstop and the tan brick school building I wouldn’t need to be in for another fifteen minutes, that I was sorry, only to do it all again the next day.
Time segments, time builds up.
If being early is being ahead of time, then being early is dwelling in emptiness.
At the airport my dad always used to a buy a newspaper or go to the bathroom right as the plane was about to board. My mom would get upset. I learned to imitate her, and then I learned to be upset on my own. But I didn’t learn to get as nervous at airports as she does. I’m comfortable with an hour buffer: enough time to wait in unexpectedly long lines and still get a snack but not so much time that my butt will go numb from sitting on hard terminal chairs. The one time I almost missed a flight, I got to the gate as people were boarding. I’d convinced the TSA agents to let me cut to the front of the security line only to have my bag searched by hand. They’d found the weathered brick, harvested from my parents’ backyard, that I intended to use as a bookend. We can’t let you bring this on, the man told me. I know you wouldn’t, but you could hit someone with it, he explained. Maybe I wanted to check it? No, I said, I do not want to check my brick—you can keep it. He placed it in a bin below the conveyor belt, and I dashed off to my gate, weaving around rolled suitcases and beeping electric carts, very on time if the place weren’t an airport, where an on-time passenger is considered late and an on-time flight is considered early.
Outside a bar in Barcelona, a man asked my friends and me if any of us had a lighter. We were standing in a circle under a cloud of smoke that rose to a curlicued metal balcony above. A friend handed over a red Bic. The man said thanks, asked if we had the time, and we all turned to each other as he cupped his hand around his cigarette; I could hear his lips against the filter. Eventually the gazes fell on me, the only one with a watch. I thrust my wrist forward and showed him the round white face, unwilling to attempt the math: In Catalan, time is a matter of addition and subtraction. If it’s 1:34, it’s two quarters of two, plus four. Time crumbles and builds around convenient numbers, those upright-minute-hand times on which we agree to meet because they seem less arbitrary than the numbers not divisible by five or ten. Catalan time hovers around itself, as if focusing, the calculations drawing nearer to the exact number, dancing like moths aiming for the light. Telling time in Catalan is like telling time with a watch purposely set wrong: You set it that way because you think the math will be too cumbersome and the purposely wrong time will have its intended effect; you stop looking at clocks in Barcelona, hoping you can live with the relaxed attitude of a place where dinner doesn’t happen till long after the sun has set and the banks close at lunchtime. But the math becomes easier, then it becomes a habit, and the time of everything shifts but remains time, which is, if anything, exact.
If I know I’ll always be early, then why don’t I always leave late?
The future has an end.
A friend and I have been wondering about the passage of time and tall buildings: Does time pass more slowly or more quickly for a person on the top floor? We keep not looking up the answer online. We trace orbits through the air between us with both hands, our elbows the center points around which planets spin.
Lately I’ve been waking up early, by which I mean before my alarm. The red minutes taunt me, pale against the easing morning. I’m either afraid I won’t wake up when it goes off or I’m operating according to a slightly faulty internal clock, one so programmed by years of punctuality-induced anxiety it won’t let even the start of the day arrive on time. When I do make it till the alarm, I’m pleased: I’m not impatient for the day to start, but I’m impatient for the night to end. Or I’m impatient to get the next thing started, because the next thing is often all I think about.
Time zones were standardized for railroads. Without common clocks, distance would strand people in time and send trains crashing into one another. Now, getting to the train early means shivering under the heat lamps or shivering in the dripping tunnel, men around me I don’t trust, space to maintain.
If I don’t get married in the next year, then my clock will diverge from my parents’—I won’t get married at the age they did. And if I don’t get married in the next year, then what. Then I’ll fantasize even more about time travel, even more about men, about being younger so the deadline is further away, so the ticking time can keep ticking until—
to match the story, but not all of it. Not the bedrest months, not the months of not being pregnant but wanting to be, not the dead-too-early parents. But the marriage—I wouldn’t mind that.
I still have to say in my head a fake TV promo—“Eight, seven central”—to remember which way the time zones move.
At the wedding of the first of my friends to get married, standing at the front of the church in a blue bridesmaid dress and gold heels, hair in an updo that required twenty-five bobby pins, I wondered what the audience saw when they looked at me.
Yes, I realized, life goes by faster at the top of a building, like at the peak of a panic.
As a kid I’d get to school early, judo practice early, I’d finish standardized tests and reading assignments early, but I wouldn’t, it turns out, finish math tests early. Sitting on a metal chair, plastic desk prone to hand-squeaking holding the stapled exam, sometimes I wouldn’t finish at all. I’d be so nervous about running out of time that I’d run out of time. The sound of pencils, frantic tapped bursts and hurried erasing like fabric rubbed against itself, the four sure lines of a boxed answer like someone announcing “I got it right”—it would all hold me unwriting at that desk, facing so much unlined white paper to be filled in so little time until that time was up.
Time runs like colors, like tights. Time crawls and time passes—not away, in euphemistic death, but by, like passing by a storefront.
Now I yearn for extra time in life, that boring existential desire of a person who has the luxury of worrying about meeting self-imposed life-stage deadlines.
Why, when a friend was waiting to be picked up at the airport by two dude friends, was she not mad when they showed up forty-five minutes later than promised? Why, she asked me, did she tell them it was fine when, had the friends been women, she would’ve been pissed? We blame it on societal expectations, she said. That’s like blaming pain on a bruise: Where did the bruise come from?
A woman needs only to say “I’m late” in a certain tone of voice to convey either fear