word for word - by William Zhuang

To be Traveling in TimeTo be Traveling in TimeTo be Traveling in Time

by Newt Gordon-Rein

I feel so strongly the sensation of becoming.

The thought appeared in my head as I was walking back to campus with my newly restrung violin on my back and a paper bag full of groceries clutched in one bruised hand. In my ears, an audiobook picked for its length and the cadence of the reader’s voice seeped through borrowed, plasticky headphones. A scene made from tinny words built itself up behind my eyes. A boy reading Virgil in the original Latin on a dusty back porch. I don’t know Latin. I don’t really know French, either, but I do try to read in French sometimes, and the thoughts of the boy from the book feel like an echo through time. I too appreciate the different curves and rhythms of a foreign language. I didn’t realize until reading its French equivalent that a “being” is a creature defined by its persistence through time. A consciousness, in the act of existing. A human, in terms of the life they live, the actions they take, the places they go.

When I first came here a year ago, the Boston subway system was a wild and foreign beast. I count it as a win that I am now more stressed about the things I am en route to do than the train hopping required to get there. Now the scratchy carpet seats feel like home, and when I sit in their scoops, I notice the world in the windows rushing by. I wrote a poem one time, feeling especially transient on the Red Line. It goes: Circuit board subway system not even Trying to hide Are we noble electrons Energy transfer T for Train Shoving against 1 and 1 and 1 Seeming being solidity Un être Only one thing’s for sure And it’s is/am/are

I stepped over the familiar dislodged sidewalk, pitched up like a tent by the robust pressure of subterranean tree roots. Thinking about being. I don’t remember what it was like to be nine and a half; to still count the divisions between years. The past years of my life are bunching together, shrinking down to essential details. Will these years I am now living seem small someday, too? Every day in college I feel like I am forming my future self, sculpting in the dark. How can the person that I am ever hope to create the person that I will be without knowing them yet?

The thing is, I am not really sold on the concept that we persist through time. My brother gave me a book that talked about how the flowing of time from second to second is essential to our perception of the world. How time is the fourth dimension. How we know things are things because they are recognizably the same across time. Seeing something once, instantaneously, is not enough. Ergo, being something once, instantaneously, is also not enough. And what of us? What does this mean for our capricious bodies? According to the book about time, when things change physically—shift or deform in the first three dimensions from one moment to the next—they no longer exist as the things that they were. Constantly, each tiny part of the human body shifts, changes, or breaks, so that in every instant, effectively, we end. It made me feel like I live in a traded body. I went into the city to buy new violin strings because my old ones had been dead for weeks. The sounds they produced were dull and gray and wouldn’t let my violin sing, and I can’t hear it if it doesn’t sing to me. I felt like a fraud in the violin shop. I don’t have many words for music, for technicalities of tone and hum. I mostly get by on feeling.

My big canvas jacket cloaked my upper body—the off-brand Carhart one which used to be burgundy, which I stole from my brother and then left at the house of a friend who kept it like forgetfulness entails a shift in ownership, and I pestered him every time I saw it until he unsheathed his arms from the sleeves one day in the big foyer by the gym doors, bunched it in his hands, and threw it at me, and it was mine again. It was raining and I should have chosen something waterproof, but I felt like I needed clothing that subsumed my body, making the particulars of the shape that I was obsolete.

I am so concerned with bodily beauty. Will I ever not be? Is that something that comes from inside, and will seep steadily out of my pores, for now and for always?

My right hand is bruised from the stubborn plastic handle of an analog metal bending machine. I was passing rods through and through the machine, coaxing a thing of movement out of the straight-cut steel. Somewhere between the repetition and an accumulated coating of dark grease, the steady deep breaking of blood vessels beneath my palm was lost to me. The next day, I stretched and felt a popping soreness in that hand and saw three evenly spaced bruises like a fading ellipsis traversing my palm.

I shifted my fingers on the paper handle of the grocery bag, holding it with two at a time to let the others rest. The gentle swinging oscillations my creeping fingers produced seemed to mirror the fluid curves of the shapes I was creating the day before; the handle of the bending machine, turning, turning. The swing of my hips. The hairpin rush and ebb of my breath. Something human about gradual, non-stopping movement. My fingers ached. I don’t know why I didn’t think to carry the grocery bag with the other hand.

I guess there are fallacies in my logic about the time-person interface. I do believe that every changing second causes the current me to disappear forever, but a next version is necessarily created in its place. The way sound waves travel through the air, not by moving the particles but by pushing quick one against the other. It’s about energy transfer. We may not be continuous, but there must be something to be said for a mercurial persistence: a being that is always different, and always singing, and always more.