All I Kill is Time

 

“I remember when I was your age, Lizzy, I thought I could die right then.” A teacher of mine wrote to me in college before she retired. “As for time, I no longer feel like it’s mine to spend. It isn’t limitless the way it once was.” 

I just had dinner with my cousin. She is 20 years old. Her dreams are those of small town girls. Move away from where she knows home to be, end up in NYC, work in fashion, book flights to Europe, you know the drill. I resisted the urge to tell her she has nothing but time, because what if she doesn’t? 

I think of Marina Keegan, Yale graduate and author of The Opposite of Loneliness. I think of her saying, “We can still do anything. We can change our minds. We can start over… We’re so young.” I think of her dying in a car crash less than a week after graduating. Not all of us have that much time. 

It won’t be long now, my mother said to me when they took my step brother off life support. Morphine drips, 24 hour nurses, surgeries, treatments, flights to places no one wants to visit. A 3 year old plays in the backyard of a house in Ohio, wondering what happened to her dad. Colon cancer. He was 35. 

Generalized anxiety. Social anxiety. Depression. Alcohol dependency. She goes over her chart with her team of doctors at a rehab center in Houston. Lexapro, mood stabilizers, antispsychotics, suicide watch. A 16 year old stares out the window, seeing the lights of a city that is foreign to her. She finally moved away from where she knows home to be, but at what cost? There wasn’t enough time for me to say goodbye to her before she was transferred to a therapeutic boarding school in Utah. 

Make her stop. She’s bulimic, I shouted at the EMT as I watched her shove her fist down her throat outside a concert venue in Denver. An entire bottle of cheap vodka, mysterious pills, cops, calls to parents, black X’s on the back of our hands. Only an hour before we promised each other we would leave enough time to sober up before getting picked up. An ambulance comes, wheels her into the back. 

A 28 year old takes her two kids to the doctor, convinced they are sick. She is anxious to the point of being paranoid. She said the world is ending, started screaming. She was just admitted to the psych ward. No diagnosis yet. They had to sedate her, my mother told me last week. She starts electroshock therapy today. What happens next none of us know. 

For those of us who are still on this earth, we are all bound in one way or another to the passage of time. As for the self being infinite, Marina might be right about that. So, too, was my college teacher when she said time is a finite resource. Some of us have our trigger on the gun, ready to kill the source of our pain: the endless stretch of time. Others have the rug pulled out from under them, suffering the cruelest fate this world has to offer: the inability to decide what to do with their time. 

As for me, all this free time has me nervous. What time does this place close? Someone shouted at me at a warehouse party last weekend. I held up 8 fingers, looked at my watch. Only 4 hours left, I shouted back. Use it wisely, and winked, knowing they wouldn’t get it. Some of us are still naive enough to believe that youth is on our side, that we have all the time in the world.