If You Close the Door the Night Can Last Forever

In some ways, I do believe that time is a constant. For instance, I recently (well, two months ago...ish) brought some boxes of my old belongings to my new apartment. They are an unsorted mishmash of papers and other "things" that I accumulated over the past 26 years. Having learned the lessons of my parents and grandparents, I am determined not to have boxes of old crap clog up my life, and in that spirit (here's where we get to the temporal theory) I have been saying to myself for the past two weeks, "I will unpack those boxes tomorrow," and to my amazement "tomorrow" always remains "tomorrow." Consequently, the boxes are not unpacked and are actually sitting in my hallway, where I have been stepping over them on my way to the bathroom since yesterday morning. Not only have I begun to contemplate the nature of time, as well as my own sluggish nature, but I have discovered that I am actually less able to hold my bladder once I know that using the bathroom is slightly more inconvenient than before. In all honesty, the latter troubles me far more than the former, and were I to see a therapist I am sure this would be an expensive problem to explore.

All that aside, I am left marveling again at how small occurrences can lead to changes in our world that snowball beyond our understanding. All I needed was my 2003 tax statement, but now I have a roadblock of memories piled up in my hallway, including gifts from two ex-girlfriends that I thought I had lost (the gifts, not the girlfriends... they're definitely gone), and I lack the will to do anything about it. Recently I ended a relationship of almost two years, and I have been going out of my way to remind myself of all the reasons I now have to be unhappy, up to and including re-reading the inscriptions she put onto various gifts and pieces of artwork she had given to me. And this afternoon I spotted another gift, one I had forgotten about, tucked in amongst the flotsom and jetsom of my life, and my masochistic heart brought the sadness back in again without missing a beat. I question sometime, whether or not our stories are character-based explorations of emotion, or just a chain of meaningless plot contrivances. This week, I'm feeling a bit of both. And as I finish this post, I know in my heart that I will put the past away, and my bladder functions will return to normal... but I also know it won't happen until tomorrow.