I measure time through methods more intimate than
seconds, years, or days.
You learn to, don’t you, when time zones lead to tears?
When the anxiety of separation manifests for years?
Time has only shown me that our meager, human
methods of dividing up a day in ticks and tocks
leaves so much time unaccounted for.
Time is more than regularity;
it should be shown as valleys and peaks
with the echo of eternity:
“As Long As It Takes,”
echoing eternally between them.
Time will take
As Long As It Takes
and rigid divisions are a shitty constraint
on a concept that is one- and ever-flowing.
So let me preach:
Measure time in tubes of toothpaste
and moments in metres and miles ahead.
Measure hours in hot water cooling,
and days in books not yet read.
Measure years in love and decades in passion
and life in what’s been produced from the thoughts in your head.
Take it from the girl who lives six hours behind her boyfriend,
five hours behind her best friend,
two hours ahead of her home address: home to the house she’s never lived in,
and three hours ahead of the first house she was ever brought home to,
under a rainbow one day in late October;
time is a patchwork of moments.
And those moments will take As Long As They Take.
