Let me show you eternity.
William Blake promised he could show you eternity in an hour, but I can do you one better. I only need ten minutes.
These last few months have been, for most people, a bizarre experience with regard to the way time passes for each of us and for all of us. I’ve seen cartoons where the calendar disintegrates and falls off the wall as we try and make sense of the days. I have laughed at endless memes counting off the months of quarantine: sourdough starter, Tiger King, Animal Crossing, mass insurrection.
Time does not behave or line up to be counted during the best of periods in our lives. Now is the last time to expect it to behave. Time is a cranky three year old at the DMV. We get what we get until we can escape.
These endless hours filled with endless tasks have caused me to reflect on the two things in my life which taught me to maximize small amounts of time better than any other. I’ve had ten minute passing periods between classes when I had to run uphill from building to other building. I’ve been ten minutes late and filled that time with regretful re-strategizations so that this never happens again and baroque, detailed wishes for death. I’ve spent ten minutes zoned out and driving, not sure how I was so checked-out and still driving safely— haven’t we all?
But those are not the eternal ten minutes.
The two ways I’ve learned to pack an eternity into ten minutes are: long-distance relationships and retail jobs.
Long-distance relationships have been the delicious torment of my life, since I first became an adult. I never seem to grow tired of falling in love with someone who remains an hours-long flight away from my real life. The drawbacks are obvious: I’ve become an expert in the lost art of pining, I spend a lot of time in transit, and I write love letters that could burn your house down. The benefits are equally obvious: the joy of reunion and the bittersweet ache of parting are yours to enjoy, again and again. You don’t have time to grow tired of your beloved. You remain your own— it is impossible to control someone effectively when you have to reach that far.
And then there are your eternities.
With an applied mind and a boundless heart, with the raw gasoline power of lust and the careful electric engine of true love, with intention shared and goals focused, two people can make ten minutes last forever. The poignancy and tenderness of intimate moments you know to be limited are the concentrate from which tame, domestic love can be distilled and sipped for life if one is lucky. Loving someone enough for a lifetime is not hard; packing it into a weekend once or twice a year is impossible. It’s Mary Poppins pulling a floor lamp out of her carpet bag. But she does it and so do I. Every ten minutes with someone I have to fight to see and have to mete out miserly time with spans an eternity. I count their breaths as tiny, individual gifts of benevolent gods. I have the ability to bless every square inch of skin, to know the peals of their laughter like the bells of a church I have attended all my life and will someday be buried beside. It’s a dilation, a combination of hyper-awareness and hyper-vulnerability. Returning to a raw and naked emotional state makes time crawl by as it did when you were a child. Ten minutes in the corner, ten minutes in time out. Take time out of the equation and you have your eternity, neatly ticked off in seconds that echo for an eon. Memories of those moments are charged and volatile, bursting open in my subconscious to warp time again months later, years, decades. Eternity is not contained.
Retail jobs are the unlikely successor to this romantic overflow I have tried to explain to you, as insensible as Romeo staggering drunk and hard from Rosaline to Juliet to death. But it’s the same trick. I just did it for different reasons and in a different way.
Retail jobs are gruesome and impersonal. The ones that I worked ground my soul and my will right out of my body. I ached from toes to crown every day, endured abuse from management and customers alike. I had my wages stolen from me, I worked sixteen hours on my feet with the throb of a bad tooth as my backbeat. I handled a million dollars in cash a week and did not make enough to pay my rent. Health insurance was a distant fable. My days started long before dawn and frequently ended after midnight; the rest of my life had to fit around the mercurial, meaningless hours that were necessary not because of demand, but because the corporation did not want me to feel as though I had any control.
I’ve written before about the real difference between white collar work and blue collar work is control. When I had my first white collar job, I was stunned that I could choose the order in which to complete tasks, or that I was allowed to go to the bathroom when I needed to. When I describe a lack of control, I don’t mean that I wasn’t treated like a shareholder. I mean that I wasn’t treated like a person.
California law requires that anyone working an eight-hour shift take a lunch break of at least thirty minutes before their fifth consecutive hour, and requires two ten minute breaks on either side of that. Violations of these laws have put me in a class action suit more than once, and more than one company has had to pay me back the wages it stole by forcing me to work off the clock, locking me in the building, or refusing me these mandated breaks.
When I did get them, these ten minute breaks were my first eternities.
When control has been stripped from a person to this level (or worse than this) they seek to control anything they can. It’s easy to see this work out when people lash out and abuse someone who works in a drive through, or their wife or children. The easiest place to reclaim power and control is from someone who has less. They cannot fight you for it. Other people hoard keys, assume a posture of ownership over office supplies, seek out leadership roles in organizations outside of work, or find other ways to seize control.
Working retail, I knew I wanted to be a writer. It was the only thing I wanted, the only future I cared to envision. I knew I would probably always have to work another job to support my writing career, but that seemed fine. So during my ten minute breaks, I would write.
I wrote scenes and lines that would go into later novels. I wrote outlines for short stories. I purged my feelings in poetry and began many essays in those bursts of time. I would visit the bathroom, already writing on my little pad I kept in my apron. I would sit at the table after washing my hands and let my imagined world expand to fill the break room, better than any book I could read, because I was in command of it. I had power, I had control. In those ten minutes, I could get a whole piece of a story, enough to feel my hands around it and know where I was going.
Those ten minutes could expand into something almost luxurious. I could eat a snack while writing, listen to a whole song while doing it, take a two minute nap after I finished something, snap back to work and feel like I belonged to myself and my time was my own. How could the next four hours matter when I had had all that time to myself?
Yes, it’s a trick. Yes, it’s a lie you tell yourself when you know what you’re going to get is not enough. But that’s always the case. We are not infinite, but learn to do this trick and we can be eternal.
In these letters, I am always trying to tell you how I feel, where I'm at. I'm always pinning my most recent short story to your fridge with a magnet, hoping that you'll read it and think of me. I'm counting days in quarantine (100 days), counting days until my next book (69 days), counting the days until I see someone I miss (eternity).
You've spent ten minutes with me and this letter. We've had one eternity. I hope we have many more.
Eternally yours,
Meg