Closed moments
Dead on impact. And she asked if there’s a pulse. There wasn’t. I know now, having looked it up weeks after. I know now what neither of us knew then. What we wondered. I sat in the car, 70MPH, thinking I don’t know if he’s dead or alive but I’m glad I’m alive. I don’t know if I will be dead or alive tomorrow but I’m glad I’m alive now. That moment is closed with a bow on it now. Over. Wrapped up. For me at least.
“There was time for us” sings Pinc Louds. Before we knew that things would end there was time. We didn’t know how much time. There was time. The time is over now. The question answered. The moment closed with a bow on it. Over. Wrapped up. For me at least.
The people on the islands of Shishmaref have known since they moved there that the land they call home will one day be swallowed by the sea, and they chose to live on them anyway. We make the promise of adaptation to ourselves with every temporary condition we submit to. (This will end. Who it allows us to be will end. We will be okay. We will learn to be in a different way. That’s the only choice we get. Most things are unholdable. Just passing through. Me too.) And we take what we can until then. I want to say we plunder the moment, but that’s not right. Plundering implies depletion, and depletion is not the goal. Rich sustenance is, ideally mutual rich sustenance.
What does it mean to hold an ended moment inside of you? It feels like a cryo chamber. Something that has reached a stable point of decay— you could deepen that metaphor to explore a human fear of decay and our framing of decay as dangerous, but it’s normal for events to rot inside us, and their byproducts are not poisonous, they are just new nutrients. An addition to the ecosystem. They leak out, disrupt, and then you stabilize.