How is time measured? By each one's memory?
Do memories have their own time and organize themselves in a random calendar? Do they endure and intertwine at their whim?
Mine is the non-time. The time that passes and yet doesn't. The cycle, the spiral, and the moment. Memories of a past knocking on the door or yet to come. It's not time, it's life and experience. Substance.
The body, being a living organism, has a cycle or destiny, a mission. And in its being, in its nature, it changes. It transforms according to stages. And that's not the passage of time. That's the transformation of the body. The nature of the organic material that the body is. We cannot measure time like that. They are not the same thing. Formal time is that of the clock, that of the modern world, arbitrary as a whim.
Life is made up of moments, learnings, reminiscences, traces of sap. And they come and go, but never disappear. They exist suspended in an elusive dimension, and I, with my soul and my energy, navigate these spaces and change the perception of my experiences, according to what happened in that moment. It is well said that the past is unpredictable... I can also see life and feel it today, yesterday, a thousand lives ago, in childhood, in the present, in the imagined future. There I arrive, fly, float, and do what I need to do. I feel time, live time. Without being time. Without attaching myself to it.
Have you read my story about a tree that I titled 'My Cypress'? I wrote it in 2021. It's the last text in my book, "The stroke of days". A tribute to the nature I fell in love with when I arrived in San Francisco. A tribute to the union with myself and with Ricardo, and also a homage to the long-distance connection with my family. I wrote it while I dared to embrace the cypress. To record the shelter it provided us during the pandemic and how San Franciscans danced celebrating health and life around it in difficult times.
As I scribbled in the pages of my notebook, I closed my eyes and heard, next to the tree, the music of timbales, saw three girls in their festive attire like that day I went to the park in 2021. The group of girls was small, but in my memory, there was a huge crowd with enormous energy, so much life dancing around my cypress.
A few days ago, I found a photograph of my cypress, taken in 2010. There I was, in front of the camera, with the robust trunk behind me, its knobby knees and needles for leaves of a pale green. Surrounded by people and life. It was the exact moment I recreated in the story. I reminisced about what I was feeling during the COVID pandemic and what I had experienced eleven years ago when I came to study in San Francisco. Time merged between memories and the reddish-brown skin of my tree. A three-dimensional mosaic like the vast cosmic space when interacting with time as a fourth dimension.
In that infinite extension, I experience what I feel, and that emotion becomes a memory that my mind relives over and over, pushed by the current like a seahorse that never tires of swimming.
All yesterday, all today, all that is to come, accessible to me, floating in the space of life, which only exists because every day I decide to live it. Make it my cozy corner, create new spaces to navigate, and to reclaim old moments nestled in my memories warehouse.
