"Where is the place between the past and the future?"
My spine meets the rigidness of my old bedroom floor in an exhausted thud. My eyelashes shuffle through the disturbed dust. I am confronted by the ceiling's harsh posture, now parallel with my new position there. The keepsakes of my past - picture frame, seashells, my old varsity letter - gather up around me in an oddly uncomfortable huddle of memories that now seem both relative and irrelative. It's been ages since I've laid here. The floor is uncomfortable, worn out carpet, shuffled over by a history of footsteps. I check my wrist for the time. 11:48pm. It feels pointless and burdening, as if the clock was a suggestion of where I should be. I wasn't searching for an empty hour hand. It was more a habit of decency, the way a decent adult feels convinced he or she should know the weather forecast.
The time had slipped away somewhere since my last visit to the room, and the gap under the door had inherited a vacuum quality, such that when stepping out, the demanding clock hands toss you onto a playing field where they chase you around in monotonous laps. But this room, these four walls, the floor on my back and the ceiling staring down on my face, stands still, as if it had been largely unaware, or hardly amused by the passing of time.
When did this place become foreign and lost to me? I surely spent a lifetime of nights on the bed, afternoons at the desk, and mornings at the doorframe of the closet. I felt the way a person would feel returning to an old hotel room. Is it possible to carry the past with you when you have so long ago abandoned it? Should I even attempt to preserve this place? My shoulders ache at what I estimate to be the weight of the room. On my knees, the breeze from the fan disperses the dust and motivates my legs to shift, move, stand, or ignore it's silent suggestion. Each rotation of the fan blades reminds me again of the clock on my wrist. I peel back the leather strap and place the watch to my left ear. Noticing an old fishnet bag from my childhood vacationing, my right hand reaches for a seashell, Galveston Beach, 2002, and I hold it firmly to my other ear. Stuck in between the two, my mind attempts to suppress the rattling thoughts in an effort to locate the quiet conversation between each ear. The mathematical ticks of the clock, each stir of the seashell, and my mind in limbo between.
After moments of restless thoughts, I give up. I inhale a breath so large, it feels as though it's mapping out a new cave in my lungs, never discovered before. But just as my lips seal tight, the air pushes back out, back into the room, and startles the lingering air over my head. My eyes scan up and down to my ears and to my shoulders. I grasp a lock of my hair and thank it for it's loyalty. The sun-kissed ribbons mark where I've been, and the chestnut brown roots tell of where I am now. I press a kiss to my fingers and pass it on to the scar on my right knee. Like the photos on the wall, it happened in a flash, and stayed with me, a reminder to not forget. My mind adjusts itself back to the task at hand. An internal voice somewhere in my head asks a question. "Where is the place between the past and the future?" Another deep inhale, exhale. I wonder. Minutes pass in focused thought. Maybe hours. I try to ignore the clock hands and the door. Staring at the ceiling, I attempt to organize the rambles of reflection.
I've noticed that it is only when I hold still my active eyelids can I envision the future and play back the past. Somewhere in my tangles of hair and the scar on my leg, the past will always have a place. But as sure as tomorrow, my legs will keep growing taller. I turn my head back to the door. The vacuum will pull me along with it, and I try to adjust to the fact that time will always be nipping at my heels, and this is just simply the way it has to be. Like a glass of lukewarm water, in the absence of condensation or steam, it is only when my brain has settled back into limbo that I can focus in on the place between the past and the present. I firmly press the objects back to my ears and listen. The present-time only exists in my mind, the only place that I can hear the serene symphony between both the seashell and the clock hands. This is the place between the past and the future.
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