Time stands still. In this place scattered with lone and stagnant travellers, as they rest their weary legs, time doesn’t exist. My phone and my laptop and my watch all display different numbers, different ratios, as one or the other or the other again remains innocently in tact with the routine reality that existed for me a few time-zones ago.
Perhaps here, in the place where people and plans and needs stands still, the essence of time is particularly abstract. People whose lives differ on impossible levels sit mere centimetres away from each other, sharing an awkward laugh about a charging port that isn’t working. Time doesn’t exist and the boundary of language bends also. Maybe lengthy, particularly explicit conversations between those whose tongues remind us of the extreme opposite reaches of the Tower of Babel aren’t to be expected, sure. But here, in a place filled with people whose humanity is the only semblance, the only olive branch of similarity, relevance, common ground shared, the jagged conversations I have are meaningless.
I wonder why, in my plain acknowledgment of this obscure freedom in being surrounded by complete strangers, why the calculated portrayal of dignified self is still of the utmost importance to me. Perhaps we are never truly free of the internal battles with our own self-conscious, not even in the place where the stakes of our external outputs are literally zero.
When did humanity become so formalised? So introspective? So terrified of exposing itself? It is as if the very act of uncovering the fact of one’s humanity is a scandal so deeply unforgivable that we instead have collectively chosen to comport ourselves somewhat like non-thinking robots. Non-player characters that know where to go and what to do because there are programs and rules to tell us those things. Even here, in the place where time does not exist, where people and things will never meet again. Where any two strangers sitting beside each other for 12 hours are no more than two perpendicular lines on a two-dimensional plane. Once closely connected, once so intimately together, but only shortly, only once, only to rocketeer away from each other for the rest of eternity.
