as much as it is worth

Do you ever get the urge to look back at old photos and videos? For me it happens whenever there's some enormous deadline looming. I think it's one of my favourite things to do. You have to be in a certain mood though. It helps if it happens to be between 2 and 6 o'clock in the morning, when it's quiet and you can hear the tungsten hum and crackle of your light bulb's filament and your thoughts flitting circuitously from perch to perch, settling in dusty corners, idly folding and unfolding their wings.



The strange thing about looking back on good times is that it invariably makes you miserable. But it's a kind of misery that you're reluctant to let go of. A rich and wholesome famine. It's the kind of sadness that makes you suddenly want to call up friends you haven't seen or spoken to in ages and tell them how you've been, and ask them how they've been, and reminisce - to be in the past with someone else, to reanimate the golden bones of youth. But really, what you want is to find out that they just so happen to be looking at old photos and videos at 5am in the morning too, and to discover that you are both right now feeling the exact same thing at the exact same time, and to listen to the sound of each other's hearts breaking and not have to hide it, and to be able to tell someone something and be understood completely. In all its dreadful loneliness and confidential glory, this moment, with someone else -- you want to be able to share this pain.




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Between 2am and 6am the distractions of daily adult life and bus schedules and deadlines and the soul-crushing drudgery of nine to five all sort of fall away and reveal to you a sacred inner stillness, an unshakeable core of solid being you almost forgot you had in you. It allows you to enter a state of unconscious, near-hypnotic concentration. You involuntarily become acutely aware of the world around you. Your focus shifts outward and you absently acknowledge the reality of entities other than yourself. That you are sitting on a chair in a room wearing clothes. You begin to notice the total and strangely dignified inertia of the objects on your desk. You note the dissonance of their erratic distribution and imagine how they maintain this posture of static disorder throughout the day, how they remain perfectly still as the sun rises and sets and evening shadows writhe and do complicated contortions along your water bottle's irregular surfaces and contours while you're away, and how no moment ever repeats itself the same way and that each moment is unlike any other moment you have ever experienced or will ever experience again and that it's all happening all at once in your neighbour's house and in your old house halfway across the world and even here right before your very eyes.


And then you shake off the burden of knowing you are travelling 43000 miles per hour through the universe on a planet pirouetting at 1000 miles per hour, and go back to checking your email, ironing your shirts, purchasing coffee.