On Time

There are moments when time refuses to behave.

It stretches, folds, loops back on itself. It moves unbearably slowly when we want it to pass and too quickly when we need it to stay. It is predictable, until it isn’t. It follows rules, except when it doesn’t.

Time is a body we are always inside of, but it is also a force we are always trying to fight.

I have spent my life inside too many versions of time. The slow, suspended time of illness, where each moment lasts longer than it should. The delineated time of grief, where the past refuses to stay behind. The shifting time of parenthood, where the present is already on its way to becoming memory. The relentless time of the clock, the measured time of schedules, the time we try to own and the time that reminds us we do not.

Across disciplines, time is both cyclical and linear, measured and felt, absolute and relative, real and an illusion. It expands, collapses, loops. It holds everything - the second, the minute, the lifetime.

But time also wounds.

1. Time folds

Henri Bergson called this la durée - the time of lived experience, as opposed to measured time. A clock may tell us an hour has passed, but an hour in love does not feel the same as an hour in pain. A year spent waiting does not feel the same as a year in joy. The past is not separate from the present - it is layered inside it, shaping the way we move through the world.

We live in all times at once.

I am here, recovering from surgery, inside the suspended time of healing, where my body moves slower than the mind, where the hours expand, where waiting becomes its own form of time. But I am also inside the time of my mother’s illness, inside the long years of her body breaking down, inside the waiting rooms where I first learned that time could move in ways I did not control.

I have held time before. I have held it in the space between diagnosis and death. In the last weeks of my mother’s life, time became something else. It stretched unbearably, each second sharp and endless. And then, in an instant, it was over. Time, which had felt too heavy to bear, suddenly disappeared.

This is the contradiction of grief: time moves unbearably slowly when we are waiting for loss, and then it moves too fast for us to hold.

I have spent the last twenty years inside both times. The slow time of her dying and the fast time of my life moving forward without her. I am inside them both, at the same time. Time does not erase itself. It lingers.

Jacques Derrida called this hauntology - the way time does not disappear, the way the past remains inside the present. My mother is gone, but she is here in the way I move, in the way I speak, in the way I age into her face. She is here in the moments that repeat. I sit in a hospital bed, recovering from another mastectomy, and I am both here and there, both myself and her, both the child who watched her suffer and the adult who now knows what it feels like.

Time folds.

2. The time of parenthood

To be a parent is to be inside the strangest version of time. It is to know, for the first time, that time is always slipping away from you. It is to hold a newborn and already feel the grief of their future adulthood. It is to measure time not in years, but in changes - the first laugh, the first step, the first day of school. Each moment already dissolving into the past, even as it happens.

Time moves differently for my son. It expands endlessly. At 16, he is still at the beginning, unaware of how quickly it will accelerate. But I know. I know that there was a last time he reached for my hand without thinking, a last time he mispronounced a word, a last time he needed me in a way he will not need me again. There is no warning for the last time of anything.

And yet, I want time to move forward for him. I want him to have more of it. I want him to live inside assumed time, the kind where the future feels endless, where time is something to move toward rather than something to count down.

3. Time collapses

Illness rips you out of assumed time. It forces you into a different kind of time, one where mortality is no longer theoretical. Time becomes something known in your bones. It is no longer infinite. It is not yours to control. It is moving toward an end you cannot predict. The illusion of assumed futures collapses, and all that remains is the present, and the question: what now?

Before my mother’s cancer, I lived in assumed time. The future was something I built toward. I thought in years. I measured time by my ambitions, by the endless accumulation of things that made up a life. There was always more time.

And then, suddenly, there wasn’t.

After her diagnosis, time fractured. It slowed into unbearable waiting. It collapsed into fear. It became something I counted not in years, but in distances between medical events. How long until the next appointment? How many days until the next surgery? How long has it been since I last felt okay? How long will it last?

4. Time marks us

1998: My mother is diagnosed. She is 37. I am 14.

2005: My mother dies. She is 45. I am 22.

2017: I have my first breast scans, find out about my gene. I am 34.

2025: I am still here.

This timeline looks neat when written like this. Structured. Contained. But it is not neat in my mind.

1998: My mother is diagnosed. She is 37. I am 14. I do not know that this will shape everything.

2005: My mother dies. But she is also still here, standing in the kitchen, telling jokes and laughing.

2017: I find out about my gene. I am 34. But I am also 14, watching my mother tell me we will get through this, now knowing that we will not.

2025: I am still here. But I am also not. I am also somewhere else.

This is how time moves now. It is not linear. It is not something I move through, but something I exist inside of. The past is not behind me. The future is not ahead. They are all here, all at once. I am not just living my own experience; I am living my mother’s. I am not just facing my own mortality; I am reliving hers.

And yet, I am also making my own time.

5. Measuring time in presence

Maybe I stop trying to control it.

Maybe I live inside of it instead.

Maybe I stop measuring time in years and start measuring it in presence.

Maybe I let go of the need for time to be linear, fair, or structured.

Maybe I just hold onto what is here.

Right now.