The Absence of Time

“What time is it?” my mother asks. “One-hundred-and-one-nine?”

She is staring at the digital clock on the stovetop, speaking the numbers aloud, but cannot perceive the hours and minutes as having any impact on her life.

So, they do not.

What is Time to a person who functions outside the very construct?

Time, the substance we humans use to motivate ourselves to live meaningful lives.

The commodity we trade for material comfort, however meager. Or, hoard futilely.

Time, stifling passion with its threat to extinguish our value, and, ultimately, our very existence, urging us to make the most of our mystery allotment.

To the person who who exists in a no-time state, there is only this immediate experience, which cannot be quantified. There is this room, with its soaring ceilings and gleaming wooden floors, the wood stove in the corner alive with undulating orange flames, sunlight moving across the walls; a wonder each time she enters.

She migrates from the red sofa to the white love seat to the leather recliner, a human sundial*.

“This really is a very beautiful place,” she observes, objectively.

 Mom can no longer look outside herself and connect personally with what she perceives; the outer world belongs to others. She resides within herself, only, lost in a jumble of thoughts that lead to no conclusions, like horses once tethered who roam wild across infinite terrain, carrying within them no memory of the life they lived before.

There is no desire to go back, to return to a more familiar state, nor is there an awareness of a future to be met. Mom lives in a state of constant newness which is full of surprises both pleasant and frightening; I leave the room through one door and return to it through another, and I am new every time.

“Now, what is your name?” she asks, as I sink into the cushion beside her, our legs pressing.

Some would call where she dwells “the present” or “The Now,” but this means no more to Mom than the past, the future, my name, or what time it is.

“What time is it?” my mother asks me later, as I chop vegetables for dinner.

She’s just making conversation, I think. Trying to banish confusion, inviting a flash of continuity.

I point to the clock over the sink, ticking undeniably. 

“Five forty-five?” she asks my back.

I turn and nod, smiling, and hand her a sliver of carrot, our fingers touching, eyes reaching. 

For a moment, I am her daughter, she is my mother, and we are together.

*from Human Sundial, music and lyrics by Daniel Star Drooker