The Great Deceleration

Steph

1

Earth has lost hold of herself.

Sun bleeds red around the contours of each river and valley and mountain and wheat field; all is suffused with this warning signal sent from our sun, and we have no collective answer to this alarm. I am twenty-nine, and according to new math I will not turn thirty for another year and seven months. Time has entered a semi-hibernation and humanity doesn’t know why.

“The Great Deceleration,” they’re calling it; a name general enough to portray the gist of all this newness without provoking the mercurial mood of the masses (that’s me and you and everyone in between.) We are the constant thrum of the earth. Afterall without the individual, there would be no mass or body politic to control (if you want to get Athenian)—I digress. Yes, we are decelerating, pumping the breaks, redefining the passage of time. More apt—time is redefining itself to us—despite us. We merely keep the minutes, as we always have. History barges through any vulnerable nook and cranny and hurls itself at us, headlong.

2

It’s been a swift three weeks, despite the deceleration, so much has changed. I’ve learned that people can develop a craving for change when their environment applies the right amount of force. Time, in giving over more of itself, has invited a new mental state—I’ve seen it in my patients more times than I can count.  

There wasn’t some defibrillating  moment that sent a simultaneous shock through everyone’s system letting them know, “Hey, it’s time to reset!” It was more akin to a slow drip of hot glue, traveling intravenously, making an appearance at every organ system and living tissue and cell that could soak in and slowly harden to the will of the cellular cement. We collectively unraveled to a dribble, and by the time anyone noticed it was too late for anyone to will themselves into action.   

3

I have a friend, Jill, who was one of the first to feel the decel—lingo for deceleration—when she was out on her morning run. Jill’s one of those people who were made for athletics. She does it all: baseball, basketball, touch-football, soccer; you’d hate to oppose her in beach volleyball. But it’s running that took her to the Olympic qualifiers. So when she checked her Garmin at the end of her run and it read 5:53.00/mile—a mile time that would render any hobby runner in an ecstatic fit of joy—she panicked at a time one-minute-and-thirty-seconds slower than her average pace. She thought an ultrasound might reveal her heart’s relocation to the pit of her stomach when she first saw the numbers.

Upon the news that she might be a normie she b-lined to my office; she half-convinced herself she was entering the early thralls of a stroke or an aneurysm. I’m one of the pediatric surgeons in our small town (one of three). Thankfully she battered my door down when I wasn’t conferencing with a patient. She gave me the sweaty rundown of her morning and demanded I “run all the tests;” your basic cognitive assessment made it clear there was nothing wrong with Jill’s rate of thinking or reasoning abilities. The sky was still blue and her mind was sharp as ever. But of course, it didn’t matter how many tests I threw her way. None of them would elucidate any deviation in her cognitive functioning, because we were all lost causes. I, the administer of the cognitive test, was experiencing the same amount of change in time dilation as Jill was—I just didn’t know it yet.

I told Jill her watch must have glitched and miscalculated her time, and if she wanted a second or third opinion to head over to the ER.

“There’s nothing else I can do since you’re not a patient.”

“I understand. Thanks anyway,” she grabbed her phone, wallet, and keys from my desk and shrugged her way to the door.

“Seriously Jill, I’d bet money it’s some goofy glitch in that watch of yours. How long you had that thing for anyway? Ten, eleven years?”

“Fourteen.” She opened the door, took a straddling step over the threshold, and tilted her gaze down to meet my eyes, “Maybe it’s just my time Steph.” She shot me a half-earnest glare, and with that she was gone.

I spelunked deeper into my chair for what felt like a lifetime.

4

That night I carried out my usual bachelorette routine: changed into my bestest sweats and sports bra, chucked on my runners (we can’t all be Jill, but we do all need at least 20 minutes of cardiovascular exercise per day; nine out of ten doctors recommend it), headed down to the local college track, and ran my own 9:30.00 mile two or three times around the circle. In my infinite norminess I usually wear a lovely Fitbit. It does the job: tells me I’m a slow, workaholic, who doesn’t sleep enough. Encouraging stuff like that; plus it has a 72-hour battery life! Unfortunately on that particular afternoon I left the damn thing in my scrubs pocket. Plus it was the third Thursday of the month, so Mr. Fitbit was well into the rinse cycle at “Champions Wash.” I sure hoped “water resistant” was marketing lingo for “it’s secretly waterproof, we just don’t want you to know that.” To think, if I hadn’t been doing little Timmy’s tonsillectomy earlier that afternoon, I might’ve caught on with Earth’s not so little, little secret. Or, for all I know, it might not have mattered a lick.

After I ran around in circles for thirty minutes I swung by the grocery store for a fresh California roll. Jerry and his son, Jerry Jr. always give me extra ginger. By then the siren call of a hot shower, jammies, and the book of my choosing lead me home. I passed out with John Updike’s, “Rabbit, Run,” held open across my chest and a half-eaten California roll trapped between my chopsticks. Living the dream, baby.