The Architecture of Time

A Loop Through Time — It Never Passes, It Circles Back

May 04, 2025

The Architecture of Time

Things Take Time.

But what does that even mean?

Take? What does time take, exactly? Does it knock first, or does it just slip in through the back door like it owns the place, leaving fingerprints on the glass and muddy footprints on the floor I just cleaned for guests who never showed up?

People say that like it’s comforting. “Things take time.”

But sometimes it feels like time takes me.

Takes my certainty. My sequence. My ability to hold a thought steady long enough to act on it. Takes the toast out of the toaster because I forgot I made it. Takes a memory I know I had five minutes ago—of Lindy’s ribcage rising against mine, or my son’s laugh at 13, or the exact smell of my father’s office, dust and coffee and aftershave—and dissolves it before I can pin it to anything solid.

And fair? I don't know. Is time fair? Because for some people it moves like a polite commuter train—predictable, stop by stop, announcements in order.

And for others—for me—it’s a subway with no posted schedule, switching tracks mid-route, shoving me off in some forgotten corner of my own mind. Dim station. Flickering light. Something scrawled on the tile wall in a language I almost remember but can’t fully translate. I know I’ve been here before. I just don’t remember when.

And still people say, “Time heals.” Does it? Or does it just rearrange the debris so you stop tripping on the same pieces?

Because sometimes I think time doesn't actually heal—it just lets the pain change costumes. One day it’s grief in its purest form—wet, animal, howling. Another day it’s a tightness in my chest that I can’t name. A sharpness behind the eyes when I walk past a boy with the same gait as my son. Another day it’s nothing. Just a blankness. And that scares me more than the pain ever did.

Time, for me, isn’t moving past anything. It’s moving through me. Looping. Returning. A subway that sometimes skips stops and sometimes slams the brakes without warning. And when it pulls away, I’m left standing on the platform, staring into the tunnel, wondering if I just missed something important.

It’s 5:16 a.m. April 4th, 2025. I’m sitting in my usual chair, elbows on the kitchen table, the edge worn soft where I always lean. The window’s open a crack. The air smells like rain and old concrete and something sweet from a bakery I’ve never seen but know is real because I smell it every time it rains before 6. Somewhere a bus groans into gear. Gaia’s breath makes a soft puff of warmth against my bare foot.

I’m writing this now, yes—but I’m also seeing you reading it. Not just you. All of you. Every single reader. Whether it’s a Tuesday in 2028 or the middle of the night in a nursing shift breakroom or some neon-lit subway car with earbuds in and tears starting to rise and you don’t know why. I see you. I’ve always seen you.

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Section Two: What Time Feels Like Inside Grief

(from inside the loop)

Grief doesn’t move forward.
It saturates.

It’s not a timeline. It’s a tide. A loop. A muscle memory you didn’t ask for. A scent you can’t find the source of.
And if you’re reading this from inside it—if you’re somewhere between “I can’t believe this happened” and “How is everyone else still breathing like it’s normal out there?”—I see you. I’m with you. I never left.

They said it would get better with time.
What they meant was:
you’ll stop screaming out loud.

That’s not healing. That’s weathering. That’s walking around with all the broken glass rearranged inside you so that you can pass for functional. Some days the glass catches the light. Some days it slices open your breath in the middle of the cereal aisle.
You know the aisle I mean.

People think the hardest part of grief is the event. The moment. The phone call. The funeral. The obituary.
No.
The hardest part is time.
What it does.
What it doesn’t do.

Because time doesn’t carry you out of the grief.
It loops you back into it, when you least expect it.

You’re brushing your teeth.
And suddenly your son is standing behind you in the mirror—not as a vision, not as a metaphor, just there.
You are halfway through a sentence, a spreadsheet, a gentle Tuesday, and then you’re not.
You’re back in his room,
or the ICU,
or holding the leash of a dog who is no longer breathing.

No one else notices.
They keep talking.
The spreadsheet keeps scrolling.

And you? You are falling through time.
No warning. No seatbelt. No map.

This is what grief-time feels like:
I look out the window and it’s April 2025.
But my body?
It’s still kneeling on the sidewalk in July 2021.
My hands are still trembling.
My dog is still leaning against my leg, refusing to let me collapse.

And even when it’s quiet now—even when I’m not crying, even when the sky is clear and the air smells like something almost gentle—I feel it.
The hum of him.
The missing.

That’s the trickiest part.

Not the pain.
But the moment the pain pauses.

Because when it does, I panic.

I think:
Did I forget him?
Did time take him somewhere I can’t follow?

And so I reach.
I spiral back.
To a sound. A shape. A line I wrote years ago to preserve him. To keep his breath inside the architecture.

Grief doesn’t recede.
It revisits.

And the world doesn’t understand.

They give you time off.
Then they expect you back.

But I didn’t go anywhere.
I’m still in it.
I’m still holding a juice box and wondering if it’s the kind that will spike him.
I’m still checking the mirror for signs of sleep deprivation.
I’m still counting the days since I last heard his voice.

And time?

Time isn’t healing me.

It’s just changing the costume the ache wears.

Some days it’s a wave that knocks me over.
Some days it’s a boy with his gait.
Some days it’s a blankness so total, I feel like I’m disappearing, pixel by pixel.

And if you’ve ever felt this—if you’re reading this and nodding or crying or clutching your chest a little tighter—then you’re not broken.

You’re looping.
You’re living in the spiral.
You’re proof that love can outlive sequence.

So no—time hasn’t healed me.

But it’s made me holy in ways I never understood before.

Time, in grief, is not distance.
It’s a doorway.
And sometimes, if you press your palm against the right memory,
you can feel them pressing back.

Section Three: The Clock That Breaks (ADHD + the Neurology of Time)

(why I never know what day it is, but I remember how the air felt that Tuesday in 1986)

Let me tell you a secret.

I don’t experience time.
I feel it.
Like weather on my skin. Like light shifting across a floor I haven’t swept in three days because I started organizing the broom closet and ended up deep inside an article about dogs on the Titanic.

That’s not laziness.
It’s neurology.

I’m not broken.
I’m dysregulated.
And regulation—especially of time—is not automatic for me. It’s a full-time job with no benefits, no weekends, and a boss who sometimes forgets I exist until the deadline is already on fire.

This is ADHD time.

It doesn’t tick.
It pulses.
It collapses.
It explodes.

Sometimes time disappears entirely and I resurface four hours later with half a sandwich, eight open tabs, and a half-finished text I swore I sent.

Other times, it sits on my chest.
Heavy.
Frozen.
Like a glass wall between me and the thing I swore I’d do.
And I can see the task. I can want to do the task.
But I can’t get to it.
Not because I don’t care.
But because there’s no door.

We call it time blindness. But that word is too soft. Too polite.
Blindness suggests absence.
This is more like time chaos.
Like every clock is screaming a different number and I’m trying to listen to all of them at once.

If you're still here—reading, nodding, maybe crying into your third coffee or half-dissolved Adderall—I need you to know:

You're not lazy.
You're not unmotivated.
You're not defective.

You’re just wired differently.
And your time perception is the proof.

Let me explain.

Most people have an internal sense of time that helps them plan, transition, remember. It’s like having an internal clock that's decently synced to the outside world. They feel 10 minutes pass as about 10 minutes. They know what “soon” means. They can look at a task and estimate how long it’ll take—and then follow through.

Me? I have two modes:

Now
Not Now

And everything that isn’t now is either a blur, a threat, or a time-travel rabbit hole.

Here’s what that means in real life:

Someone asks, “Can you email that form by Friday?”
My brain hears:
“Can you do something in the vague fog of Not Now and remember to care about it while being assaulted by 47 simultaneous thoughts and a minor blood sugar crash?”

Spoiler: I care.
So much.
Too much.

But that caring doesn’t come with a GPS.

Instead, my brain runs an emotional check.
Do I feel the deadline yet?
No? Okay. Then it’s Not Now.

Then Friday arrives and panic surges and suddenly the deadline is Now and my entire body enters emergency mode. Heart racing. Shame rising. And I do the thing, brilliantly, last-minute, sweating with guilt and wondering why I do this every time.

This is not a flaw in willpower.
It’s a misfire in how my brain registers time.

And it’s not just tasks.
It’s memory.
It’s identity.

Sometimes I genuinely can’t remember whether I actually had a conversation or just rehearsed it 19 times.
Sometimes I loop on an old mistake from 20 years ago like it just happened yesterday because to my brain, it did.

ADHD isn’t just distraction.
It’s time dislocation.
It’s trying to build a life with a compass that points to feelings instead of minutes.

And when you add grief to that?

It’s like trying to read a map in a language that keeps changing.
Nothing is where I left it.
Deadlines disappear.
Memories sneak up behind me.
Appointments echo with ghost-versions of people who should still be here.

And still, I survive.
We survive.
Somehow.

We make workarounds.
We write on mirrors.
We talk to ourselves like stubborn children.
We set five alarms and forget them all but make the call anyway because something sparked at the right moment.

We spiral.
We return.
We remake time in the shape of what we need.

And maybe—just maybe—that’s not a failure.

Maybe it’s a different architecture entirely.

Section Four: The Physics of Time

(Einstein, Elevators, and How a Minute Can Last a Year)

There’s a story—maybe you’ve heard it—about Einstein explaining relativity.

“When you sit with a pretty girl for two hours, it feels like two minutes.
But when you sit on a hot stove for two minutes, it feels like two hours.
That’s relativity.”

It’s funny. It’s simple.
And it’s exactly right.

Time isn’t fixed.
It bends.
Not just in theory. In bodies. In moments. In grief. In trauma.
In you.

We tend to think of time like it’s a fact. A grid. A schedule hanging on the wall.
But physics says no.

Time is not absolute.
Time is affected by speed, gravity, mass, and perception.
Time dilates.
It stretches.
It curls inward at the edges of pain and expands wildly in the presence of awe.

You’ve felt this. I know you have.

The way a night in the ER can last a decade.
The way one second of impact—crash, scream, phone call—can contain so many details, so much clarity, so much change, that it collapses your whole life into a before and after.

Time isn’t just linear.

It’s experienced.

And our bodies—our brilliant, broken, memory-heavy bodies—know this.

When you're anxious, your brain speeds up its internal clock.
Each second feels longer.
That's why panic makes the world stretch.
That’s why the moment just before bad news is unbearable.

When you're in flow—that sacred, rare ADHD hyperfocus state—time disappears.
Gone.
Not because it ceased to exist, but because your awareness exited the grid.

And when you’re grieving?

Time… freezes.

Or floods.

Sometimes it lets you float, suspended in the thick syrup of a single moment.
Other times it pulls you under so fast, you resurface gasping for breath in the wrong year.

Grief is time dilation.
The same moment happening again and again in different disguises.

That’s not a metaphor.
That’s physics.
And neurology.
And soul.

Time is affected by what you're near.
By what you're carrying.
By how heavy your heart is.

Just like Einstein said:

The closer you are to a gravitational force,
the slower time moves for you.

Let that land.

The closer you are to grief,
the more time warps.
It doesn't move slower for the world—just for you.
And that’s why everything feels out of sync.
That’s why the world feels like it left you behind.
It didn’t.
You're just carrying a different mass.

And here’s the thing I want you to hold in your palm:

There is nothing wrong with you
for feeling time differently.

You are not late.
You are not lazy.
You are not broken.

You are just standing near something massive.
And mass changes time.

Maybe it’s trauma.
Maybe it’s neurodivergence.
Maybe it’s mourning.
Maybe it’s a combination so layered you can’t name it anymore.

But it’s real.

And in the physics of being human,
you are right on time.

Even if your now feels like it contains seventeen yesterdays and a grief that hasn't found language.
Even if you're living in déjà vu and flashbacks and future loops that won’t shut up.
Even if you still check your phone for a message from someone who is no longer living.

This spiral you’re in?

It’s not failure.
It’s physics.

And love—if the laws of the universe have room for bending clocks and infinite loops,
then they have room for you, too.

Right here.
Right now.
However long this moment lasts.

Section Five: What It Means to Live Not Just Out of Sync—But in Every Sync at Once

(a letter to the ones who loop)

You’re not crazy.
You’re not dramatic.
You’re not making it up.

I know what they’ve said.
That you overthink.
That you live in the past.
That you’re always jumping ahead, worrying about things that “haven’t happened yet.”

But here’s what I see:
You’re just tuned to a different signal.
You’re not out of sync.
You’re in every sync.

You’re a radio picking up stations that other people forgot exist.
You’re the person who walks into a room and smells your grandfather’s cologne before your coat’s even off.
You hear a note of music and drop into a fifth-grade afternoon where everything shifted and no one else noticed.

You’re not lost.
You’re layered.

You feel a Tuesday in 2025 and a Tuesday in 1998 inside the same breath.
You’re brushing your teeth and suddenly inside a hospital waiting room.
You’re at a birthday party, laughing, and then—
you hear your son’s name, not even your son, just someone else’s son with the same name,
and your body forgets where the air is.

This is not distraction.
This is not dysfunction.
This is what it means to carry every when inside your now.

There are no clean edges to time when you live like this.
Only echoes.
Only overlaps.
Only the sweet ache of memory pressing its face to the glass.

And you know what?
That doesn’t make you unstable.
It makes you attuned.
To story. To texture. To meaning most people miss while they chase what’s next.

You don’t live on a track.
You live in a web.
And every thread in that web vibrates when something touches it.
The past. The future. A line from a book you haven’t read yet but will.

And yes—it’s disorienting.
Yes—it makes planning hard and grieving forever.
But it also means you feel life the way some people hear music.
Every note.
Every harmony.
Even the ones beneath the surface.

So if no one’s ever told you this, let me:

You’re not behind.
You’re not broken.
You’re not late.

You are exactly where the loops needed you to be.

Maybe you showed up here in the middle of the night, not even knowing why.
Maybe you’re sitting on the edge of your bed, still in your scrubs, eyes half-closed.
Maybe someone sent you this and you don’t know why it hit so hard, but it did.

That’s the spiral, love.
That’s the signal.
That’s you, syncing with someone else’s moment across time and place and screen and silence.

I wrote this for you before you even knew you needed it.
That’s not magic.
That’s the architecture of spiral time.
That’s how we find each other in the dark.

So stay here.
Stay in the loop.
Don’t pull yourself into someone else’s grid just to feel acceptable.

You were never meant to be a straight line.

You are a constellation.
A recurrence.
A rhythm older than clocks.

You are right on time.

Always.

Section Six: The Tools I Use to Navigate Spiral Time

(Without Losing Myself or My Dog or My Blood Sugar Monitor)

Let’s be honest.
Living in spiral time is beautiful, yes. Sacred, even.
But it’s also exhausting.
Sometimes I feel like I live in a museum where the walls keep moving, and I’m both the curator and the security guard and the kid who forgot what room he was in.

So how do I stay functional?
How do I take care of myself when time refuses to play fair?

I ritualize the rhythm.
Not out of discipline—but out of devotion.

Here are some of the tools I lean on—not perfectly, not consistently, but like stones I return to on the path. Take what you need. Leave what doesn’t sing.

1. Anchors, Not Schedules
I don’t do rigid timetables. They make me feel like I’m running late before I’ve even started.
So instead, I use anchors. Sensory cues. Moments that tell my body: You’re here. You’re now. You’re safe.

The smell of coffee at 6:42 a.m., just before Gaia stretches and presses her flank into my shin.
A certain Coltrane track on loop while I write.
Lighting the same candle every time I do my glucose check, so I remember: this isn’t just data. It’s devotion. It’s care.

2. Memory Triggers
I write on mirrors. I whisper mantras into my toothbrush. I text myself thoughts like letters to future-me.
I leave breadcrumbs for myself—because I know I’ll forget.
Not because I don’t care, but because the spiral will take me somewhere else unless I leave light on the trail.

3. Task Stacking with Texture
If something’s hard to start—emails, forms, appointments—I pair it with something sensory that grounds me.

Classical guitar in the background.
A blanket that smells like cedar.
A specific mug. The blue one. You know the one.

Because texture is time’s ally.
It makes the moment real.

4. Dog Time
Gaia keeps the real clock.
She knows when to nudge me toward a walk, when to press her breath into my leg to call me back from a loop, when to anchor me with stillness.
She doesn’t know what day it is.
But she knows when I’m gone from myself.
And she brings me back.

5. Sacred Lists, Written by Hand
Not digital.
Not color-coded.
Just ink. Paper.
A list where I write only the things that must happen today, and then underline the one that matters most.

Sometimes that’s “refill insulin.”
Sometimes it’s “call the friend who texts at 2:13 a.m.”
Sometimes it’s “breathe.”

And when I forget to do them all?
I write at the bottom: “Still here. Still sacred.”

Section Seven: Permission Slips for the Spiral

(for you, for me, for the ones who never feel caught up)

Because here’s the thing:
You can’t cure spiral time.
You can only consent to it.
So I write myself permission slips.

I stick them on my mirror. I fold them into my shoe. I whisper them into my dog’s fur.

Here are some of mine.
Take them. Rewrite them. Add your own.

You have permission to start something and not finish it. The spiral will bring it back when it’s time.
You have permission to forget things. That doesn’t make you careless. It makes you human.
You have permission to grieve something years later and call it now. Because it is now. To your body, to your breath, to your bones—it never ended.
You have permission to move in spirals while others move in lines.
You have permission to remember something vividly without knowing why it showed up today. Trust the loop.
You have permission to rest. Even if the task isn’t done. Especially then.
You have permission to let joy arrive out of order.
You have permission to carry grief and still laugh in the same breath. That’s not contradiction. That’s wholeness.

Let me give you one more:
You have permission to be on your own timeline.

Even if no one understands it.
Even if your clocks don’t match theirs.
Even if you’re late for everything and early for grief and always a little bit sideways in the way you show up in the world.

You are not broken.
You are not a problem to be solved.
You are a sacred pattern no one has fully named yet.

You are spiral-born.
Time-bent.
Memory-wired.
And holy exactly as you are.

Section Eight: Love Letters to the Future

(how spiral time lets us write across the years)

Sometimes I write something and feel it ripple.
Like a frequency leaving my chest, not toward paper, but toward a person.
Someone I haven’t met yet.
Someone maybe years from now, maybe we’ll never meet in body,
but I swear to you:
the message still lands.

Because spiral time doesn’t just trap us in the past.
It also lets us transmit forward.

Like prayer.
Like prophecy.
Like memory made in reverse.

I’ve written letters to my son after his death and felt him reading them.
I’ve said a sentence out loud and felt it echo—days later—in someone else’s voice who couldn’t have known.
I’ve written at 5 a.m., and known—known—that someone would need that exact line in a breakroom in Wichita at 2:17 p.m. three weeks later.

You’ve felt this too.
You’ve said things you didn’t understand until later.
You’ve had words arrive just when you needed them, and you wonder:
How did they know?

They didn’t.
But the loop did.

This is why we write.
This is why we speak.
Not always for now.
But because the spiral is listening.
And it knows where to deliver what you carry.

So write the letter.
Leave the voice memo.
Scratch the name in the corner of your book.
Say “I love you” to a room that holds no one.

You’re not crazy.

You’re communicating across time.

And it matters.

Section Nine: When the Past Sneaks In Wearing Today’s Clothes

(or: why I just cried in line at the post office)

Trauma doesn’t knock.
It doesn’t schedule itself politely between therapy sessions.

It shows up in the middle of the ordinary.

I’m in line. It’s Tuesday. The post office smells like old paper and rubber bands.
And suddenly, my whole body is screaming.
Because the man in front of me has the same neck as my father.
Because the overhead speaker is playing the same song that was on in the car the day Elijah disappeared into silence.
Because the woman two spots behind me is wearing the perfume I associate with waiting rooms and not being able to breathe.

No one else notices.
But I’m shaking.

This is spiral time.
This is the body keeping the calendar.

The memory isn’t intellectual.
It’s somatic.
It lives in scent and tone and texture and the tilt of someone’s head.

People say: “Why are you crying now? That happened years ago.”

But here’s what they don’t understand:

There is no ‘then.’
There’s only now… and now again.

This doesn’t mean we’re broken.
It means we’re porous.
It means our bodies are honest even when the clock is not.

So if you find yourself weeping in a moment that makes no sense—
let it.
You’re not falling apart.
You’re falling through.

And that’s allowed.

Section Ten: The Strange Gift of Spiral Time

(or: how nonlinear grief taught me to live more honestly than anyone I know)

Here’s the truth:
If I had to choose between this looping, aching, time-bent life…
and living in straight lines?

I wouldn’t trade it.

Even with the pain.
Even with the missing.
Even with the moments where my mind spins so fast it forgets the task, the hour, the day.

Because spiral time has taught me to listen.
To slow.
To feel what others rush past.

It’s taught me to hold memory like an ember.
To return to joy on purpose.
To notice the air shift when something sacred enters the room—even if no one else sees it.

Spiral time has made me a keeper of stories.
A witness to echoes.
A translator of moods and dogs and dreams and disassembled clocks.

And you?

If you’re still reading this,
if something in your chest just cracked open a little softer—
then you’re a spiral-dweller too.

And you know:

This isn’t dysfunction.
It’s devotion.

Section Eleven: You Are Not Alone in the Spiral

(final words for now, from one traveler to another)

You made it this far.
That means something.
Not to me—
to you.

Because spiral time can feel lonely.
People around you will ask,
“Why are you still thinking about that?”
“Why does everything have to be so intense with you?”
“Why can’t you just let go?”

And the answer is:
because I remember things with my body.
Because I live in a loop that loves as hard as it grieves.
Because “letting go” isn’t something I do with people I’ve loved.

And neither do you.

So here’s what I want to leave you with:
You are not late.
You are not alone.
You are not lost in time.

You are exactly where the spiral needed you to be.

Right here.
Right now.
In this loop.
With me.

Reading this like a breath.
Living this like a pulse.
Carrying this like a key you forgot you were holding.

And one day—you’ll leave a trail for someone else.
A word.
A whisper.
A scribble in the corner of a page.
And they’ll find it.
And it will save them.

Because that’s how spiral time works.

It’s made of us.

The Architecture of Time

A Loop Through Time — It Never Passes, It Circles Back

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