Time

There was a haze of dryness in the rich Kenyan atmosphere. It lapsed in my mind, creating a desert.

I long to feel fresh air in my lungs.

I long to see the preceding signs of a morning sun rise, the dewy, humid air trickling down my window.

I love you.

I love you.

I…

Kyle, I love you.

I built a series of connecting, cascading, moving beams of light—-and I created a glass kaleidoscope of magick out of soda ash, Silca sand, limestone and my dreams of you.

Of the Camillas you gave to me—-when did you give those to me? Five years?

A month, a week? After-all, as Einstein said, Time is relative.

What a fool I am.

I looked at those white flowers and felt like a fool. You had once also given me a marigold. I had saved that in my science journal—-pressing it into the pages.

Secretly, thinking of you as I wrote down my thesis notes.

When you handed me such radiance, I merely suggested I had no time for such frivolous things. I had experiments to run. Theses to determine. No time for me, you mean——is what your look said after my cruel words hit our combined air.

But I did.

I so desperately needed it.

You knew me as a young man, and gave me hope.

Hope that one day, I would stop living above the clouds. As if I was too good for humanity. For friendship. For love.

I only spoke to you of creating a time machine.

You would smile, the freckles on your nose punctuated by the moon—-as we’d look at the stars. You dark brown hair, a bit too long—-your eyes, a dark green—-like the rolling hills of Ngong.

You traveled from America (New York)to see the world, to see faraway worlds and new places.

I stayed in one place hoping to escape reality.

My mother Zuri did not approve of anything. She always wanted perfection from me. I blame the fact of her deeply strict demeanor that my father died when I was three. Once I turned nine years old, she expected me to take on more responsibility. School was sometimes not open, and those days I was busy.

My mother did not altogether approve (of me).

“Adir, you will study everyday for exactly two hours every night. Do your chores—-herding goats, tilling the soil, gathering the water from the well, and clean the kitchen floor. And, if it’s not right, you do it…” her hard look hit my small frame. I nodded. I blinked back tears and felt the stoic expression she wanted to see on me harden as deeply as I felt it hit my soul. My stomach dropped.

“Again. Yes. Yes, ma’am.” I deligently replied.

My mother was a soldier who never fought in any war. She learned warfare through fighting off evil in her childhood home. Men coming to steal from her family one time(she had to grab the family hand gun as her father was away and scare them off). Her father forcing her to work all day and night to keep their family from starving. She came from a house of five other siblings. She was the oldest.

She worked for her rights.

She always told me time was our most valuable resource.

That you will lose value if you squander time. I found myself closed in all the time and worried about the future so much that I grew up despising the present.

I wondered to myself… if time was actually real. If it could exist in a vacuum and breathe… or if it would collapse in infinite loops of death. Death because time needed life to help it move forward.

Can a moment last forever, the one with you and me—-

When you taught me to listen.

Of truly immersing yourself in nature.

You said, “First try and separate each sound, identity it, and then..”

“Kyle, that is insipid. Nature is merely the foreground of our environment.”

But you kept going on, “You mean, Adir, that nature is inspired. Not insipid. To enjoy the splendor of life—-to see how it was Inspired by our Heavenly Father, God is inspired. And that everything you hear and see and smell and fear and long for—-was created for us. And listen. Listen to the sounds. Feel the soft breeze. See the twinkling light between the tree branches… it is here. Just as you and I are here. In this moment.”

“How can I listen to anything when you talk and talk all day long?” I asked, defiant.

You laughed in a burst of mirth and joy then, and smiled at me.

That smile…

I never told you—-how I loved you to see you smile.

I asked you why you stayed here in Africa.

You merely gave me this look. I cannot describe it. Like… how you know everything and nothing from a single gaze… I saw it.

There was something truly magical in that look. Your green eyes were luminous from the sun beams. You somehow told me everything between us. All the secret things and all the little things and even the big things.

I would huff and complain and curse. I wouldn’t let in the moment. I wouldn’t let you into my closed in reality of claustrophobic, scientific madness.

Finally, you said, “I want to make sure you’ll be okay.”

My heart fluttered and I felt my face heat up like a boiling flask for one of my experiments.

I sighed. “I am fine. Why do you worry?”

“Because I see you—-get into this mindset of doing something so precisely and meticulously, that you almost hurt yourself in the process of finding that one, perfect gateway to… enlightenment. To clear your mind of mortality. To find a solution to this life. Yet, I see it… your eyes tell me that you need something else.”

Kyle’s words were dripping like an IV into my bloodstream, dripping so slowly and so apparently—yet I never noticed it. Until, it was overflowing into my subconscious. It flowed into my mind and soaked up my tears and the pain and the agony of my being. It drove into my conscious—-it flooded my heart.

“How can you possibly know all that…” I said with wide eyes. “How can you know my mind almost better than I do?”

He just frowned.

“Kyle? Why do you spend so much time on a fool like me?” I asked, almost in a desperate attempt to either get him out of that stupor of loyalty for me… or…

Tell him how… it killed me when I was not near him… How deeply I needed him to stay. Forever. But, I couldn’t.

“This time with you… is the most quality thing I own. So, I spend it this way. I own my time. And I use it for you because it is for us.”

I thought of time. How it can create such beautiful products of your memory.

And sometimes, it can create a random, chaotic sense of frustration—-of something so unimaginable—-something of visceral horror that only a human mind can reveal.

I wanted to find a way to store that power. Of time. And squeeze out the functionality of it and create my own purpose. A new purpose for humans.

You told me you liked my brown eyes. How they were wide and open and could be sweet. (But, mostly—-so serious, you would tease me)

And the day you gave me the Camilla flowers.

I was wiring and creating and building and smashing.

Smashing my love.

My love for you.

I didn’t see you.

You tried to get me to look in your eyes. I was lost in my glass-light merry-go-round Twilight Zone—-I was stuck in madness. A madness that felt more real than the ground I walked on.

You took my hand.

I pictured my mother’s stern look along with the touch. I did not reciprocate the offer of your embrace.

But, then something happened.

The moment that had been hardened and had disjointed my memory with a negative reaction to intimacy—-had resolved itself. I found a different sense of my mother. Laughing. Smiling, cooking and singing. A different order of things.

A mathematical problem I longed to find an answer to.

I write down the formula for gravity.

F = G*((m sub 1*m sub 2)/r^2)

I research photons and the speed of light.

According to relativity, time stands still at the speed of light.

Photons do not experience time.

I combine these theories and try to find a way to store photons in a vacuum—-to induce or replicate that speed of light through the vaccum of moving light(photons).

I knew it sounded like insanity. Pure insanity.

But I found a way to do this despite my self doubt.

But moving physical matter through time—-was something that was really the impossible part.

What was I trying to prove?

What was my accomplishment if I were to succeed?

I realized… that physical objects cannot be transported through time.

But, now—-as I finally accomplish my task, I realize the horror if it all. Too late.

I couldn’t stop time.

But my mind could go through my memories—-stop and start and restart and loop them——and I found myself stuck. Still.

Trapped in memories and through the interactions between everyone I’ve known. Happening in real time. But trapped in the past. Nothing new. All the same.

This was the peak of my power.

I had found a way to change only small variables. A slight change in order or disorder.

My mother’s frown….

…… turned into a smile.

Could you change things and shape a new, better future for others this way?

Or will I be trapped here? For all eternity… with no way to see how this ends? If anything really ever ends??

But I do know this—-traveling in time when you have no memory of the event—is not real. You can only move in your own timeline.

But I placed a Camilla (or was it a marigold?)petal in it—-and that imprint of you

Carried in my hippocampus. A physical footprint of something that could’ve been. Might’ve been.

And that day when you took my hand—-I took it back —-how I reacted.

I changed things.

And when you looked at me with that magnificent gaze—-

I told you what I had been hiding deep inside of me.

“Kyle…” I took his hand in mine. I hold our tightly grasped hands close to my heart.

“Yes, Adir?” He asks. Our eyes meet.

“Kyle… I love you. All of you. Your quirks. Your lighthearted philosophy, your understanding of life——all of you. I adore it. I wish to be close to you.”

And he is happy but surprised —-but then…

Time escapes me. I escape Time.

He pulls me close.

His hand is reaching for me. Colors mix and melt and hues fall around us as if they are alive. The green hue of your eyes hits me like a euphoric beam—-delving into my psyche——a green light into my soul.

We draw closer.

All events of my life point to this.

A freeing moment.

I long to feel fresh air in my lungs.

I long to see the preceding signs of a morning sun rise, the dewy, humid air trickling down my window. You are near me.

I love you.

I love you.

I…

Kyle, I love you

We kiss.

And in my memory—-it fades, gets more vivid—-fades.

Did it happen?

Yes.

In some small space of time.

Can you exist in a vaccum? No.

It’s impossible.

I fall back to a memory as a child.

Swimming in my aunt’s pool. Running past the wide, huge green yard to the swing near the thick forest trees.

I’d swing, swing so fast and so high, it felt like I was flying through the expanse of the forest. I thought: I will come back here one day when I’m older.

And live in this beautiful moment forever.

And I thought really hard—-materializing that Camilla flower. Egg shell white. Smelling of water and life and vanilla and your love.

I saw your smile again.

And you were with me.

And then I heard it—-

I listened

And the magical and natural noises we heard, we could discern and dissect—- but

In one moment, of the booming orchestra credscendo:

We could hear the Divine through all the noise.

And I saw you. I listened to the space between your words. Between the heavy spaces of light and sound and matter.

You wake me up. I’m with you now, Kyle

Always.

I’m free.