Tuesday at Seven

Seven o'clock on a Tuesday feels like a warp in time and space. Some kind of illusion of life, twice every 168 hours. Seven o'clock AM and seven o'clock PM.

Maybe it's the way Tuesday is sandwiched by other days; Monday begins the week, Wednesday sits squarely in the middle. Tuesdays are meaningless by comparison. In the same way, seven o'clock is sandwiched by meaningful hours; six is just after work, eight is when it's finally late enough to start the slow process of going to bed. Seven is neither.

It is seven PM. Tuesday. I have given up on the night and stand vulnerable underneath the tepid water of my shower. When I inherited my parent's house after my mother's death, I inherited a glass shower. The mirror is just across the bathroom, so you have the pleasure of turning your head to the side and watching your own naked body go through the motions of having a shower.

It is unsettling to say the least, and discorporate to say everything else. To see out of the corner of your eye a pale elbow move in a room you know has no other beings: it simply takes you out of it. You realize that you may never have existed in the first place, that your current consciousness is somehow stuck in this place, in this moment, on a Tuesday, watching the strange fleshy body of a man moving under water.

And then you think, what is a Tuesday, and why? Who assigned weeks, let alone days? As the sun moves further and further away from the spec of land that this being currently inhabits, won't the very idea of time itself no longer be fixed? Isn't it changing, little by little, and does any of it matter when this being can barely comprehend the size of space itself? The vastness of the universe, when it sees so little, breathes so feebly, scrubs its soft skin even though soon it will die, be a pile of bones, be consumed and forgotten by the rest of the universe.

I step out of the shower, and nearly no time has passed. My wristwatch, resettled into the divot beneath my wrist bone, perfectly covering the palest, thinnest flesh that hides my pulse, reads 7:21. As if the time matters.

A watch, like so much in life, is really only symbolic of my inability to separate myself from the needs and wants of society. Time, as a concept, really has no meaning on my life, other than the inevitable and impending time-crunch that is my lifespan. That which has a beginning and end. The middle time is wholly inconsequential, but others try to convince me that it is not.

Days are cyclical; weeks are cyclical. The hours never change and yet we are constantly reminded of them. To what end? I still can't figure it out. Because it's always Tuesday, it's always Tuesday at seven o'clock, and there's nothing at all I can do about it.

2.6.25