Eternal Moments

I sit in the place I work staring out a window onto Ponce De Leon Avenue, or Street, or Road, or maybe even Lane, though probably not Lane. I sit and I stare at cars, vans, trucks, and bicycles drive by all day long. People cross the street (or road, or avenue, or lane, though probably not lane), and cars park in the parking lot. The sun shines, or it doesn’t. Rain doesn’t fall, or it does. Life moves forward outside the wall of windows that block me out of the outside world, but doesn’t block out my ability to see life move forward, and move at an everyday existence kind of pace.

When my shift is over, if its ever really over, I leave the box of windows that is the office I work at, a place that even uses windows for tables, so that I can see my feet, moving at the pace of everyday feet, through the table – when I leave this place, I enter into the outside world, and assume the everyday pace of those who live outside the box of windows that is my workplace. I assume the pace and speed of the people and plants and pieces of paper that blow around in the wind, which before I had only observed from my desk, but now come into community with by virtue of being outside, and moving at the same pace. The pace of the outside world is fast. Everyday pace is a quick pace. Not long after I join the everyday pace of the outside world I am right back in the box of windows, once again being blocked out, but not my vision, which I use to observe all those things that I observed the last time I sat here, at my desk and stared out the window.

It was during one of these moments of staring out the windows of my workplace, the ones in the wall, and not the ones we use for tables, that I came to understand that there are moments that are eternal. There are moments when, even though you know you lived before them and that presumably (unless you are going to die in one, in which case it becomes a completely different genre of moment) you will live after them, time ceases to move, or moves so slowly as to not be perceptively moving at all, which is the same as not moving. These moments are eternal moments. They are moments that last forever. They feel like forever. Forever becomes a blanket of time that descends from wherever time descends from and wraps around you, and smothers you with time’s sweet existence. And no matter how hard you struggle, you can never escape from the warmth of the blanket of time, wrapped around you for what seems like an eternity, and you feeling as though you do not need a blanket, and feeling smothered by the blanket, because you were not even cold in the first place. Sometimes we are cold. Some-times time flies by so fast that the gust of wind it creates makes us shiver with the goosebumps of realization that time is always moving.

In those moments, we wish we had the blanket of time in which to wrap our cold and shivering bodies, because we want those moments to last forever, and they never do, and they never will, and no matter how often or loud we cry, we are left like babies naked on a doorstep with no mother to care for us. And the people inside the house to which the occupied doorstep belongs do not want us either, because if they did, they would have heard us cry, and would have opened the door, taken us into their house, and wrapped us with a damn blanket. But they don’t. (We have no home!) Those moments, the moments when we cry for eternity’s warm embrace, there is no blanket, and we are left cold by the swiftness of time. There are moments that are eternal, however, and they do last forever – or they feel like they last forever, which is the same thing. They are the moments of the incredibly mundane, when no thought or motion comes to my body or mind. They are eternal moments that wrap themselves around my existence and keep me warm with the cozy feelings of forever. And with their eternal warmth of a thousand clock-less suns they suffocate my will to live, my will to breathe, my will to blink – for each blink is a vain and fruitless attempt to measure what is an immeasurable amount of existence and existing in a vacuum of timelessness. Each blink comes down with the entire weight of eternity, and it crushes my soul.

These eternal moments are what I experience everyday at work. As long as I work in this place with the windows in the wall (and for tables), I will live forever – and I will die everyday.