Time Happens Twice a Day

The other day I was pouring through YouTube videos, crawling down rabbit holes, refreshing new clips every ten or fifteen minutes. Nothing was connected. It was video game reviews, politics, then a tutorial on French pressing coffee. Music videos for the new country songs I’ve been vibing out to. And boy, have I. Country music—the hidden genre I always thought I hated but am winding up loving. It’s strange, but I’m here for it. Just shrugging my shoulders and crawling down rabbit holes all the time and letting the mud stain me up.

Along the way, I heard a quote. One of those blurbs that floats in past your ear drums and in a moment you know you won’t forget it, even if the context was utterly pointless. And this context was utterly pointless.

Even a broken clock is right twice a day.

I’m a package fanatic. Box up a phrase in the right way and I’m sold and jotting the letters down in my journal and reminiscing on them for too long. Wallowing in them like a pig out on the farm. Even an idiot is right sometimes. Nope, that’s not packaged right enough. That’s a no-brainer, a given, a little life-trope that turns out true every once in a while. But a clock? There it is. And there it went, floating, dubbing out loud across the back of the front of my skull. Just right enough.

And I suppose a broken clock is right twice a day. Two minutes of every twenty-four hours it gets to chime and cry like the town drunk just how right it really is. I love that—even something as useless as a broken clock can be valued for a slice of the time-pie every light cycle. That feels familiar.

I’m a broken clock. That must be it. Obsessed with the passing of time and the remembering of it, the jotting of it, the recording of it all, like I’m falling down and down and trying to grab the straws, the rope, the handles, anything that can anchor the world for just a minute. Pause it all and let me breathe. But it doesn’t. It just ticks on, ever on and on, and leaves me behind and I feel it. But it drags me all the same. Kicking and screaming and reeling out, living in the past and the future but always accidently existing in the present. So I’m preoccupied by time. The idea of it, the passage of it, the forming of new times and the graveyard of old ones. Troubled and haunted, walking through it all the same.

It’s seamless and perfect. Everything the same, like a row of blank dominoes lined up one after another, tipping and tipping with exact cadence. And they do, they always do and there’s not a damn thing you could ever do to pause ‘em, stop ‘em, switch ‘em all up. But even a broken clock can be in the right frame of mind twice every day. And I feel like a broken clock. Most of the moments I burrow in are strange and uncomfortable and seem to be ten minutes off, two hours behind or ahead. And twice a day I catch a weird little glimpse at what real life is like. I smile at it, wink at it, and I’m all right. But just for sixty seconds, and another sixty later on.

Two hits of exactitude doesn’t always feel like enough. Sometimes when I’m smearing all over the place and neurotic and wrung, I wish I could be right all the time. Wish I could feel in place, in time. But then I’m reminded that I’m three minutes off, and the right digits might sweep by soon, but they’ll disintegrate again and I’ll sit and tap my knees in the sunshine and imagine rain. The leaves will blow down and scatter across the pavement like dust and dog hair in the corner of the living room, and the world will die and remind you it’s dying.

I’ll weep for it, but those tears won’t be for the crunched and husked-out leaves or rotting bark, nor the trash and litter that blows around. They’ll be for me and my misplaced stake in time. Out of time, on top of it, below it, confused by it, lost in it and away from it. And I sure am. But it ticks