By Kenyatta
Baby girl has ruined my time perspective.
It’s crazy how you start to think about time in prison. When people ask you how much time you have left to do, and you say, “About four or five years,” their reaction is always the same. “Damn,” they say. “That’s a long time.”
And it is a long time. But if you tell a prisoner you’ve got five years left, he’s happy for you. Five years? Man, you’re damn near home already. I guess it’s all a mater of perspective. When you compare five years left to fifteen done already, well, it just doesn’t seem that long.
See, when Einstein said that time is relative, he knew what he was talking about. When you measure time, its passage is charted in relation to the position of of observation. Most people look at time from ‘now’. So they’re living n now, which is crazy short, and comparing it to then stretching back forever. They think, “Damn, that’s like a billion nows.” And when you get sentenced, that’s how you feel, like that five or ten or twenty years is just forever, a billion nows that you’ll never see the end of.
But after a while — and I don’t know if this is beautiful or sad, but it is survival — now isn’t as short as it used to be. Because when this now looks and fells and lives just like the last now did, and every now in the foreseeable future promises to be exactly like this one, well, it’s all just one giant now. We don’t count time in minutes or hours, or even days and weeks. Prisoners count time in months and years, and rejoice at single digit numbers. Were it not for that, we could not maintain sanity, I think. How can you look ahead to decades of nows that promise futility and loneliness and not go crazy?
And now she’s here, messing up my sense of time. I see her so infrequently, for such a little while, that each moment is so precious I can hardly enjoy it, because I’m constantly aware that this now will soon pass, and the next now will be spent without her, and then I’m left counting nows until I’m with her again. As difficult as it is to look at all those years stretched out ahead of me, each one is broken up into a legion of nows, I don’t know that I would trade it for what she makes me feel. It’s a moot point, really, because I don’t have any choice but to feel what I feel.
Until I see her again, I count the days.
