In Between (Christmas) Time

Kodachrome Christmas is the best Christmas.

I feel a bit adrift lately. We just went to a Christmas concert on a cold, damp Wednesday night, which was nice, but a bit odd. I was already feeling the carnage of Christmas before it arrived. The carnage I refer to isn't the pressure of gift-getting, or of meal prep, or of baking, or of having company over, or even the last-minute rush of work. It's a carnage of my own perception of time. I’m feeling timelessness. As in, I have no idea what time or day or year it is. We saw a live show on a Wednesday? So it feels like Thursday or Friday, but it’s not. It’s cold, damp, and grey like November, but it’s actually December; that is, until suddenly it's -16°C and it feels like January. Lately, we’ve been watching old episodes of The Great British Baking Show, which were shot during the pandemic. Having a second Trump presidency only makes this time dislodgement worse. Is it still 2019? 2017? 2030? I can’t affix words to this feeling of time drift other than it feels like I’m a viewer of my own life in slow motion. At times I’m busy, punctual, ticking off boxes, checked in, tuned in. While other times, it feels like 2 hours passed in minutes, or I forgot to put out the bins because Wednesday is tomorrow. Isn’t it? I see Christmas decorations out and about and have to remind myself it is, in fact, Christmas.

In physics, the elasticity of time is called time dilation. Yet, I'm not feeling what Einstein predicted; I'm perceiving time in a very jumbled way. I don't want to raise any alarms about my cognition either. I'm not forgetting what I had for breakfast, but simply by the early evening, breakfast has felt like it happened a week ago. I would liken this to that feeling you get if you've ever been in an accident and it seems to happen so very, very slowly, or like some moment in sports when you felt like you were moving normally, but for some reason, everyone else was just standing around and you walked in on net and scored. Then you think to yourself, "That was weird." Later, you wonder why you couldn't just do that all the time. For the last few days, this feeling has been even worse. I've had a cold. Not a bad one, but one that has drained my batteries and forced me to try and sleep it off, which has only messed with my sense of days drifting slowly by in a flash.

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