purplerabbits

There is never very much time though sometimes it seems like there is way too much time to fill, but that's an illusion unless you are immortal which I am not. Sometimes I fill time with games and sometimes with sorting seeds or buttons or beads or dismantling jewellery or having a bath or taking ages in the bath or doing a crossword in the bath. Sometimes I kill time until it is dead with the games which make you click once every minute or so which eats time as you wait just long enough to not get bored but are still bored. Sometimes time goes away because I am cleaning but more often it goes away before I can finish cleaning and get to the stage when I wonder why I spent so long cleaning because who is it for anyway and it will just get dirty again. Sometimes I account for every penny and every calorie and every bird and every book and every plant in my garden and every pokemon I ever caught and every fruit and vegetable and meat and fish and gemstone and star I know. Sometimes I feel as if I am literally counting grains of sand or seeds which are grains of sand.

I do not count every pot I made or every thing I knitted but I did once count every ball of wool,which is probably the wrong way round. Also every film I can remember seeing and every live gig I went to and the books I owned as well as the ones I have ever read, but those lists are not complete which makes them pointless, or would do except they are already pointless. Once I tried to track how many words I wrote a day but I gave up and I gave up on the films and on the list of bus routes I had travelled and the lists of countries I'd been in and cities and counties were only for quizzes and don't count. But quizzes do count - I am learning every country in the world and every capital city but just as a list not as a way to match places to countries at least not for all of them, so they are just words, and some of them have only four letters and I can list the capital cities that have only four letters and also the countries.

So it is not a surprise the time goes away which it would do anyway because that is like literally the most predictable thing in the whole of existence that time passes at one second per second but it passes less memorably and therefore faster if you list all the jewellery you could sell or sort your photos into months and days and years.

I can make a list of tasks for every day and of tasks for every week and of tasks for every two weeks and of tasks for every month. It is harder to do the tasks even when I do not do them on the days and hours and weeks they should be done, but those that are done present a kind of satisfaction - like an eaten bowl of rice, an empty plate, a clean plate. All I want is for the plate to be clean, the page to be clean, the bags to be laid out clear.

I can list my weight over time, but not for all of time. The lists come and go in time like leaves and petals and birds that come in summer and go in winter or come in winter and go in summer. The seasons of the making of the lists are not as predictable but they do ebb and flow like a particularly complex set of tides or like the ebb and flow of waves of starlings in the sky which look as if they should mean something important but maybe don't. I try to control myself and my things with words and sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't and it ebbs and flows and approaches and recedes and when it recedes it leaves a line of scraps on the beach where the rubbish and the shells and the seaweed mix together, high tide marks and low tide marks, neep tides and springs.

Time does the thing that time does but the lists in my mind and the things in my life look as if they will be done and clarity will ensue and all will be well and all will be well but I do not reach the stage when all manner of things are well.