Time is a coiled spring

On seasons and memories

My classmates and I watched our professor draw a circle on the whiteboard—around and around, tracing the same orbit, the lines almost but not quite overlapping, creating a thicker and thicker circle with each swing of his arm.

We were English majors in a class that focused on television, discussing season one of True Detective. Specifically, we were talking about Matthew McConaughey’s Rust Cohle in a scene from episode five, “The Secret Fate of All Life.”

Image Description: Matthew McConaughey as Rust Cohle—his hair long, his face wrinkled and haggard. He holds up a crushed soda can in front of his face, spinning it lightly. Behind him, a projector and file boxes reveal the setting, a police conference room. The line he is delivering is captioned at the bottom of the gif: “Time is a flat circle.”

In this scene, Rust Cohle is a former detective, haunted by—and being questioned about—a past case. His life philosophy, shaped by Nietzsche, boils down to a simple phrase: “Time is a flat circle.” In the scene, Rust is presenting insight into his philosophy to the detectives reinvestigating the case:

“In eternity, where there is no time, nothing can grow. Nothing can become. Nothing changes. So death created time to grow the things that it would kill. And you are reborn, but into the same life that you’ve always been born into. I mean, how many times have we had this conversation, detectives? Well, who knows? When you can’t remember your lives, you can’t change your lives, and that is the terrible and the secret fate of all life. You’re trapped. Like a nightmare you keep waking up into.”

A bit dramatic, sure, but that’s television for you.

There’s a feeling in the pit of my stomach, a sort of spiraling slickness, as autumn approaches.

Zoe and I have been in our new home for a year; in that time, so much has changed, yet I so often find myself thinking about what has stayed the same. Not consciously. More like muscle memory, really. I suppose it’s déjà vu, a feeling with which I’m not especially familiar.

Until college, my life was one of movement—my family going wherever my Dad’s job took us. Any time we were somewhere for more than a year, this sort of feeling came on, though I tended to move through it by throwing myself deeper into schoolwork. In fact, school swallowed my life so wholly—especially as a teenager—that I was able to trick the feeling into tying itself to school, giving it an impersonal quality.

That changed when I began college.

I’d been excited by my decision of where to go to school, in part because I knew I’d be there for four years—the longest I’d lived anywhere. A dream come true that quickly turned into a nightmare; during freshman orientation, I was love-bombed, manipulated into a “relationship,” and sexually assaulted multiple times.

I spent that first year of school struggling. I did my best to throw myself into school, sure, but I wasn’t taking eight classes a day, five days a week, plus homework. I wasn’t in the safety of home with my family. I wasn’t able to escape the constant reminders of what had happened because my abuser had touched every part of my life on campus. Not to mention that he still went to school there, too, and it was impossible not to run into him.

I did all the schoolwork I could, writing eight page papers when the assignment was two. I had messy friendships that were often strained because none of us were equipped to deal with the emotional complexity of my situation. I barely ate, barely slept.

My professor—the one who taught the class on True Detective, actually—taught a class that spring semester about Southern literature, which included a field study over spring break that saw us driving from Savannah, Georgia, to New Orleans, Louisiana. He knew I was struggling and encouraged me to apply for the course, into which I was accepted. It was a lifeline; the encouragement he offered was a reminder that there were people who saw me as a person—and an intelligent one at that.

Image Description: Emory in college, pre-transition, standing in front of Eudora Welty’s home. A straight-faced emoji covers his face. He is wearing a t-shirt from a bookstore in Oxford, Mississippi, a pair of skinny jeans, and gray Converse. He is holding a brown notebook and has a tote bag slung over his shoulder. He is thin—too thin—and his shoulders are curled forward.

I went on the road trip and had a great time. Too great of a time—I dreaded returning to campus, to real life. My life. I barely ate on the trip, too, and felt increasingly panicked. By the end of the trip, I was a real fucking downer. My professor caught me panicking and asked what was wrong.

“I’m just afraid that this is the best it’s ever going to be. What if this is the best thing that ever happens to me?” If this is the best thing that ever happens to me, what do I have to live for?

“You’ll find a new best thing—there’s always another best thing.”

For the rest of college, I struggled through the beginning of the fall semester. The slick feeling wormed—no, eeled—its way up my throat and down my spine, coiling around my stomach and squeezing. Time felt like a flat circle, at least emotionally.

I didn’t end up living there for four years. COVID-19 sent us all home part-way through my sophomore spring. In the fall of my junior year, I had a breakdown and moved back in with my parents for the end of that semester and all of the spring semester. And I graduated a semester early, in December instead of May. Even with all that chaos, I refused to transfer to another school, something my parents suggested time and again. I had chosen my college, and I refused to be chased out by trauma trapped in my muscles, in my subconscious.

But the idea of leaving was often tempting. Time was a flat circle, and I was tired of going through the same feelings over and over again.

Zoe and I went for a walk in the park this weekend, and something about it—the sun on my face, the breeze grazing my arms—sent me back to last September. The same park, the same path. So much has changed since then: we got married, we adopted Marmalade, we bought new rugs, we rearranged our furniture, we added new decorations to our walls, we painted our dining room table and chairs. But all that difference doesn’t chase away the feeling that we have done this all before.

Our first year in this place had many joys, but it was also marked by so many painful difficulties. And I carry all those feelings with me as the days go by. The challenge is to focus on the remembered happiness, not the phantom sorrow.

Image Description: A photo from the park last autumn. Half of the frame is taken up by the grayish-blue, cloud-streaked sky. The other half is taken up by a grassy field covered in fallen leaves. The image is bisected by a line of golden trees.

Time, I think, is less like a flat circle and more like a coiled spring. Cyclical in nature, yes, and layering on itself. But new, too, still a forward momentum. Tightly wound with potential energy. Ready to burst.

Strike season, baby! The United Auto Workers are striking! They deserve reasonable hours, they deserve pensions, they deserve dignity and respect in the workplace. Bring the same supportive energy that we’ve been showing SAG-AFTRA and WGA.

Bottoms on top. Zoe and I went to see Bottoms in theaters today; it was stupidly hilarious and hilariously stupid. A fun way to pass some time! Perfect for our matinee date. I don’t think comparisons to Superbad or Book Smart are accurate—not every movie set in high school and focused on sex falls into the same category, critics—but I think that it did a damn good job of being what it actually is: a dumb, horny, funny movie! Queer people deserve Stupid Comedy, too. And that’s exactly what this was.

Image Description: A still from Bottoms. Rachel Sennott’s PJ stands next to Ayo Edebiri’s Josie in a high school gymnasium. They’re both wearing long-sleeved rugby shirts, red for PJ and blue for Josie. PJ has a broken nose and bruising under her eyes.

Doctor’s orders. The DeSantis administration in Florida has decided to spew some vaccine bullshit about the new COVID boosters, saying that healthy people under the age of sixty-five shouldn’t get the shot this fall. So, consider this your friendly reminder to follow CDC guidelines. Please get boosted!

1. I’ve been making slow progress on my next quilt; Zoe taught me how to use the sewing machine, so I’ve been making plenty of crooked stitches! I’m happy with how it’s going so far.

2. Mitski’s new album is fantastic (as expected).

3. We tried Spindrift’s apple cider sparkling water because, um, autumn spirit? I’d describe it as drinking applesauce-flavored Pop Rocks. Zoe says it’s like toned-down Martinelli’s. I give it a 4. Zoe gives it a 7, adding, “It gets docked some points for the mealiness at the end.” Do with that what you will.

4. We bought mushroom-shaped nightlights for our bathroom and, in a pleasant surprise, they turned out to be exactly what we paid for! Hooray! I want to leave you with the English translation of the “product features” on the box because it reads like poetry:

   

   Image Description: The side of the nightlight packaging. The English translation of the product features reads, “The night, the night light lights up, Into the room, no longer dark turn on the light, I woke up at midnight, still see clearly, As JiaoBai light shone in the month, During the day, night light no longer shine again And I don’t remember if forget to turn off the lights, Night light mushroom shape as decoration Article, for the room added a brilliance.”