Time is Not a River
People always tell me that time is a river—continuous and unstoppable. No matter what lies in its path, the river carries it or flows across it. Yet, I think my time is not so simple. It is more like my hair. It never stops growing, but when it grows too long, it starts to split and wither like flowers, and I have to cut it. Its era comes to an end. I can look back at photos of myself with different hairstyles, but there is a gap between those images and me. We are not part of the same river; they are no longer part of my present time.
That is to say, I don’t believe my time is linear. I never feel time as a line that can be measured by a ruler. Instead, I feel my present more as an edge that keeps chasing me. When I try to be aware of that edge, it feels as if it’s moving so slowly it will never catch me. Yet, when I lose awareness, the edge suddenly rushes forward and engulfs everything, like a starving lion.
Every morning on my way to school, I see a man sitting in a café with his golden retriever. The dog always wags its tail at me when it sees me. When I think of its shimmering fur and cheerful smile now, I feel a connection to it—a first-person, in-the-moment kind of connection. I know I’ll see it again this week, just like always, and it feels as if this routine will continue for a long time. Yet perhaps there will come a day when the man and his dog stop coming to this café. Then, this tiny part of my life will fade without my notice. When I finally realize they are no longer part of my life, they’ll already have been gone for some time. While I can logically acknowledge the existence of this day, it feels almost impossible to imagine it emotionally. And there are bigger things in life—more significant connections and routines—that will eventually slip from my grasp, falling beyond my edge and my imagination.
Countless things in my life have already fallen from that edge. Most go unnoticed as they fall. It’s like boiling a frog in water that gradually heats up—the frog (me) doesn’t feel the change until it’s too late to react. When spring melts into summer without my noticing, that spring and everything I did during it falls from my edge. When a new school year starts and I no longer see familiar faces in the hallways, the previous year, along with the people who graduated or transferred, falls from my edge. When I graduated from high school and moved to New York, part of my roots in my hometown fell from my edge. Once in a while, I feel as if so many subtle things that together constitute my identity have fallen from my edge that I, too, have fallen from that edge. Then, a new version of me steps in to substitute the old one, inheriting her memories and consciousness, believing they are the same person, when in reality, they are almost strangers.
The world beneath my edge is what we call memories—a completely different approach to time, one defined by the past tense. When I look at these memories, there’s almost a screen between us. It feels as if I’m watching someone’s movie from a first-person point of view. Memories haunt me at random times, reminding me of what I’ve lost: time with certain friends, love for a particular food, the ability to feel happy about simple little things. Yet when I try to confront that loss and search for traces of their connection to my present self, I never manage to find them.
My childhood friends, like me, have grown into adults who are strangers to their younger selves. My childhood runaway places have changed into spaces I can barely recognize. When I eat my favorite childhood snack now, it doesn’t taste as good as it does in my memories. When I try to cheer myself up with small, cute things in life, I feel numb and untouched.
The world and its inhabitants are four-dimensional. Their pasts fall from their edges, just like mine. Yet when things fall, they don’t simply disappear. They transform into stories that make us suddenly want to cry when we pass a street that reminds us of something distant yet familiar. We know we can’t grasp it again, we know it’s gone, and yet, despite these realizations, we do everything we can to inhale and savor that fleeting hint of familiarity from the past.
Time is not a river. Time is a besieged fortress (just like the title of Qian Zhongshu’s satirical novel). We always long for what lies on the other side of the wall, never realizing that our “now” will also fall from the edge someday, just like our past. By the time we realize something has become the past, we’re already on the other side of the edge, filled with nostalgia and discontent for the present—until that present, too, becomes the much-cherished past.
