So, there used to be this thing called a party.
The concept was simple—gather a bunch of living, breathing bodies in the same place
at the same time and just see what happens.
Some parties were promises—and those were called “weddings,” and other parties were
goodbyes—and those were called “funerals.”
There were parties to “warm” new homes and parties to mark the day you were born
and parties to signal the arrival of a new year.
And if my friends wanted me to be on time to a party, they’d lie—
I wasn’t proud of my reputation with time but…
SINDHA: Do you think my lateness is genetic?
DAD: I don’t know.
SISTER: No.
MOM: Yeah because it’s too much like your dad’s.
There’s a lot of different ways to be late but you’re late in this particular way that’s
exactly like him.
SINDHA: Have you ever heard of IST?
SISTER: Yeah.
Indian Standard Time.
DAD: It means…
SISTER: It means that you don’t have a sense of time.
*laughs*
Once someone was describing their color blindness to me and it reminded me a lot of how I feel
about time.
How I know that 3pm and 3:05 are technically different, but I personally don’t perceive
that contrast.
Time resembles color in other ways, too — we can only access the smallest sliver of both
spectrums.
Non-linearity and relativity remind me of ultraviolet and red-green — what scientists
call the “Impossible Colors,” colors we can measure, but can’t actually see.
And like color, time is continuous.
We can’t locate the seam of an hour, the border of a day — the same way we can’t
declare with any precision where yellow becomes orange or orange becomes red.
And yet, over the course of human evolution we’ve insatiably sought to structure time.
Dividing the sun into angles and tidily organizing the story of our lives into years.
It kind of embarrassed me — humans taking the unfathomable expanse of time and refining
it into hours.
The universe is 13.8 billion years old — who are we to assert the importance of a minute?
But I tried my best to banish those thoughts.
I bought clocks and set them to five minutes early.
I filled calendars with meticulous, month-long plans.
I even put a whiteboard on my fridge and every morning, I wrote the date down.
I was finally closing the gap — becoming one of those people who holds the reins of
time.
And then —
The pandemic happened.
And suddenly Tuesdays were Thursdays were Sundays.
Flowers bloomed and wilted and babies learned to crawl and grey hairs grew in, but the larger
story of time felt interrupted — bland birthdays and cancelled weddings and solitary holidays.
Doing the same thing in the same place with the same people, day after day after day.
Previously imperceptible shades of time showed up at our doorsteps.
Like special relativity — in the spring, time moved glacially as it does alongside
black holes.
And then, without warning, it accelerated — so that when I asked my mom what day in
May we were on, she gently informed me it was July.
Or non-linearity.
How we emerged after months spent holed up in our homes, only to find ourselves reliving
the very same moment that had driven us inside in the first place.
The whole world joined me in temporal disorientation — even my punctual superiors were at a loss.
They knew how to arrive five minutes early — not how to repeat the same five minutes
43,854 times.
I regretted taking time for granted.
Now I would give anything to hear someone say, “the party starts at five, the doors
close at eight — don’t be late.”
It turns out our perception of time is incredibly malleable — even color can distort it.
When people are shown blue and red stimuli of the same duration — they consistently
overestimate the blue and underestimate the red.
Temperature also warps time — the hotter we are, the faster we feel it passing.
And music, too.
Oddly, uptempo music decelerates time and downtempo music hastens it.
So, if smooth jazz, heat waves and a bit of blue are enough to mangle time, no wonder
a pandemic upended it.
In 1983, a paper published in the journal Science described an experiment in which researchers
claimed to have overridden the human eye’s opponency mechanism — allowing people to
see “impossible colors.”
The participants said the colors were vivid and awe-inducing — but entirely indescribable.
Like seeing red for the first time and having no name for it.
I imagine them returning to their lives, tucking the impossible colors away, into the closets
where we store our most inarticulable memories.
But had they not been alone in what they’d witnessed, had the whole world woken up one
day, suddenly able to see a new color — I think we’d have created a name in a matter
of hours.
Because when it comes to color, we innately gravitate towards classifying what we see.
Naming the shade between orange and red “pink,” calling the blue of the Aegean “royal,”
and the blue of the Caribbean “aquamarine.”
But when it comes to time, we have such a limited lexicon.
Fast.
Slow.
Long.
Short.
Future.
Present.
Past.
Beyond that — we’re pretty much speechless.
But not hopeless.
In 1812, Dietrich Nikolaus Winkel invented the metronome.
But two hundred plus years later, classical composers still prefer to communicate musical
time in sentimental Italian.
Tempo allegro — cheerful time.
Tempo allegro ma non troppo — cheerful time but not too much.
Tempo rubato — stolen time.
Maybe we’ve been too fixated on fixing our metronomes when what we need most is vocabulary
for these new colors of time.
To describe 17-second months, millennium-long days and a year without any parties.
Language for when time undergoes a phase transition right there in your hand — days melting
and months evaporating and years freezing.
Maybe there’s a word for that in Italian.
Maybe it translates to “impossible time.”