Time skips like a scratched record

The way that time works and years that tip your world upside down

“I think, because of the way time works,” he reflects, after describing the best week of his life. “I probably won’t ever have a week that good again.”

I keep that sentence in my periphery for the next few days, rolling it around inside my skull. I go for a run beneath one of the summer’s last pink evening skies and weave my way through a group of boys in shit shirts on their way to a party, drinking Coronas and smoking cigarettes. Nothing feels the same as it did. I’m out for a run on a Friday night for god’s sake. Are the best weekends already in the past? Is this what life is? Lying down and accepting that it isn’t how you thought it would be? I take out my phone at the traffic lights and message Emily: “No party is ever going to feel like a uni party again.” That’s how time works. 

We go to Thorpe Park and ache after we ride the rollercoasters, lean back in sticky Costa booths, holding iced coffees to our throbbing foreheads. Our parents get sick and you take it for granted until it happens to you. Breakups gain a new, more momentous and consequential weight. The summer exhales its last warm breath and we worry that we wasted it all again. Wasted it working from home. Sitting on trains. Making plans then breaking them too quickly and callously. Not seeing the people we were meant to see. Not falling in love. 

But we danced. And sang and cried in crowds full of teenagers. Soaked our SPF-smothered bodies beneath the sun. We swam in the sea naked and stayed up all night for the hell of it. I only recently stopped thinking of life in absolutes; in best and worst days, weeks, seasons. If you think that way the best has always happened and the worst is yet to come. 

So we take part in all those cliched meme-fodder activities like signing up for half marathons and picking up teenage hobbies and doing sober stints before reversing it all on a big bender in the name of brat summer. We put away the razors and delete the calorie counting apps. We quit smoking, unless we’re drunk and didn’t buy them ourselves (because that doesn’t count.) Self-punishment is a dead-end, after all, but it’s still a seductive one. There’s nothing to do but cope now. Life gets heavy with coping.

When I was a kid, someone told me you could only get stung by a wasp once a year. I spent years believing there was some kind of global communication system between all the wasps in the world so they would know if I’d been stung already. Then one summer I got stung twice. 

When my parents got sick, I wondered what they dreamed their lives would be like when they were children daydreaming in mid-century primary schools. Have they done everything they dreamed of doing? Does a diagnosis make time speed up or stretch out and slow down? My dad says he’s more nostalgic for his childhood the older he gets. It comes back strongest sitting at the kitchen counter when he’s eating custard or rice pudding. All I really know about his childhood are stock images of the 1950s and 60s and my own insubstantial, hazy childhood memories of my nanny’s first house in Gravesend. There are so many conversations with the people closest to us that we will never have. So many accidental secrets. 

Change happens slowly and then all at once. Some years breeze by and others skip forward like a scratched record. If someone met me for the first time now, I would be different in a barely perceptible way, and I mourn who I was before. Because of the way time works, I will never be her again. 

Instead, a new kind of loneliness lodges itself in the back of my throat and it tastes different from the other times. It’s hard and heavy and it doesn’t go away around other people. I redownload a dating app to see if anyone’s free for a drink. To see if they want to try and fail to recreate the feeling from before. What if it worked out? Would we play at chasing down the dawn again or would it slot neatly into our neat adult routines? We message each other until we get bored and never meet. 

Outside the cathedral, I inhale the past until my nose bleeds. I let it pulse and shudder and live anew. I let it keep me up til dawn. So we grow older with and without new heartbreak, sitting in offices missing the syrup ache of first love. It could be different this year, but the rain is heavy, perpetual, loveless. It rains for days and the season tastes the same as it did when we tripped up sticky steps at mid-week club nights. 

I suppose autumn is for getting older. We have no school to go back to. We learnt about everything so today the talk is wise and we know it all. We hide from October rain beneath unwashed blankets. Read some book or other. This is living life as much as anything else is. 

I’ve been craving sleepovers lately. I want to watch stupid films and eat sweets until my teeth hurt then lie next to my friends in the dark making jokes at first, then later talking about how scared we are all the time. In April, I dreamt I had a sleepover with Amy Winehouse where we did each other’s hair and talked about boys all night. When I awoke, I felt so sad because she was my age when she died and it was only then that I realised how young that really is. I messaged Joanie about it and she said, “Yeah shitttt we’re only babies as well.” 

There’s still so much life left. Because of the way time works, some of the best moments have already happened. We’ll be stung more than twice. I’m leaving Brighton soon. A year by the sea has been fruitful in some ways and less so in others. I’ve been writing a lot lately. I’ve been staying up too late. I applied for a European passport two years ago. It feels like it’ll take forever. The time will pass anyway. My world will be smaller for a while and then it will be so much bigger. That’s the way time works.