on time as both god and ghost

how twenty-six weeks changed both everything and nothing

what if we could release ourselves from an internalized time clock and remember that slow is efficient, slow is effective, slow is beautiful?
— dr. alexis pauline gumbs

we are taught that time must be urgent, dramatic, loud. but not all transformation arrives that way. some events in life are loud—so loud the world can’t help but notice. the alarms, the crisis calls, the sudden flips that crack open everything we thought was stable. those moments come with sirens and witnesses and a rush of messages from friends and family. they demand our attention and our breath.

and then there are the quiet moments, the still spaces between the storms. the anniversaries that arrive without fanfare. today is one of those for me—six months since one day i was writing about grief, about impermanence, about how none of us are promised a long life, and the next day everything flipped on its head. six months since my partner begged me to go to the hospital and we received the results we never would have guessed were coming. six months since i was tethered to a hospital bed, counting iv bags and fighting for my life with a kind of quiet panic that became my ritual. six months since my body was at war, and in many ways, so was my life. my health was crumbling, my heart gutted, and my sense of self shattered. six months since a life i thought i knew unraveled into something unfamiliar, fragile, and raw.

it was december… it was nighttime… it was forever…

and then it wasn’t.

it’s strange what changes in six months. stranger still what doesn’t. sometimes i swear it’s still that night in the hospital—the one where i didn’t know if i’d wake up. sometimes i swear it’s been an entire lifetime since then. my body has lived millennia in these six months. my soul, too. and yet i woke up today exactly as i was six months ago. there is no neat narrative arc for what’s happened in that time. no dramatic climax, no satisfying resolution. just this strange unfolding: slow, spiraled, holy.

today, i woke up with the same bones. the same body. the same breath. and yet i am not the same. i want to tell you about that.

about what it’s meant to try and live the biggest, most actualized version of my life, only to find that it has required my life to get very, very small.
about what it’s meant to sit in rooms alone… to write and write and write until i find myself and my peace again.
about what it’s meant to trade speed for slowness, certainty for presence, company for solitude.
about what it means to live inside queer time—unscripted, unrushed, unbeholden.

there are mornings now when i wake up and forget that i am sick. and then there are the evenings when i remember with such violence that i can hardly breathe. that’s the thing about time when you’re healing, when you’re grieving, when you’re living with one foot in this world and one foot somewhere else entirely… it warps…. it vanishes… it repeats itself… it becomes both ghost and god.

i’ve done things these past months that i didn’t think would ever be possible again. not heroic things, not grand or public—but quiet, stubborn things. my body is slowly re-learning what it means to move with intention, to hold strength inside fragile systems. we took a trip to colorado and i found myself on trails in the mountains again. i fell in love with strength training, each day in the gym a little prayer to the universe that i will regain some of the nearly forty pounds of muscle i’ve lost. i’ve hiked through grief, snow, disease flares, sunlight. i’ve let myself be witnessed in all of it—by my partner, by myself, and by the universe.

i still get all of my nutrition through tpn and the nightmares still visit me, but somewhere along the line, i have also picked up a dream. a vision. a flicker of desire, hope, clarity. a reminder that something in me is still becoming. i have hold of a thread again and, though i don’t always know what i’m weaving, i keep showing up to this relationship with myself. not in some clean, linear, “self-love” instagram kind of way—but in a deeply human, sometimes-messy, sometimes-exquisite kind of way. i’ve wandered away from myself more than once, forgotten my own dharma. i’ve lost track of my values in the fog of survival. some days i forget that nearly dying taught me anything at all. i’ve met versions of myself i thought I had buried. i’ve cried over small things that cracked open lifetimes of sorrow. i’ve laid still on the floor and felt both the unbearable weight and unspeakable gift of simply still being here. some days, i grieve the version of me from just before all of this began. some days, i am more myself than i have ever been before. it’s been six months and there will never again be a “back to normal.” instead, i am someone new. someone softer, braver. someone who no longer turns away when the page reveals hard truths. someone who listens when their body says not yet, and who celebrates every time it says yes.

six months have taught me many things and perhaps this has been the most resonant: time doesn't only move forward. we are always living in echoes. our words carry ripples beyond what we can see. they spark courage, resonance, remembrance. that’s the eternal part of time—the part that lives on without us even noticing. but here’s the ephemeral part: this moment. right now. this breath. this version of us that exists only today—no longer the one from six months ago, not yet the one we are becoming. just this flicker of consciousness. this single heartbeat. this truth: we are still here. and here’s the hardest truth: the distance from death makes it easier to forget. easier to forget that this life—this very messy, painful, gorgeous, confusing life—is sacred. easier to forget how fucking precious it is to still be here.

to still be here.
still hurting.
still healing
still walking the line between devastation and becoming.

i want to remember that linear time is a colonial construct and that healing doesn’t move in straight lines. it pulses. it spirals. it comes in waves. and it often happens beneath the surface, in places no one else can see.

there’s a kind of time that exists beyond clocks and calendars. a sacred time. a time that lives in intuition, in breath, in slow mornings and quiet walks and the way dogs know when you're grieving. a time that can’t be measured in milestones, but in presence.

i believe, as jack halberstam writes, “queer time is about the potentiality of a life unscripted by convention”. in this way, where we are right now is not a detour from life, but life itself. the life we are building—interrupted, slowed, spiraled, sacred—is not broken. it is queerly whole. none of us is falling behind or running late. if we choose to, we can be on a different clock altogether. one that honors grief, illness, pleasure, uncertainty. one that knows healing doesn’t move in straight lines. a clock that is queer in every sense of the word—unruly, nonlinear, defiantly off-script.

and by that clock’s standards, i am right on time.