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The Quintet of Sunset
A Short Film and a Meditation on Time
Like others that I’ve spoken with, my experience of time during pandemic is disjointed. It has become hard to track. Before, time was a rigid thing with neat boxes to measure it by: school drop-off, yoga class, soccer practice, my teaching commitments, work meetings, doctor’s appointments, etc. Now, time has no form, no clear function: I find it expansive one day, precise and fleeting the next. Things are beginning to reopen right now, to pulse closer to “normal” or the new normal, whatever that means. Still, time remains allusive and interesting to me.
Too often, I find myself asking. “What day is it?” And in the Spring of 2020, the question I posited frequently was “How is it still March?” Time brought some change (a vaccine, elections, the end of the school year, etc.) and yet so much of my life stayed very much the same.
Four calendars now grace our kitchen walls. One for each child, noting their online courses and virtual meetups with friends, one for me with my standing zoom commitments and irregular meetings. The fourth calendar tracks the children’s baths and our meal plan. Two other calendars sit on my desk, in addition to a planner. These are visual markers of my desperate attempt to keep everything in place, to understand the ebb and flow of time around me in an existence that…
