Haunted When the Minutes Drag 1

1. Time Stopped Behaving Itself 

I didn’t notice time stopping so much as misbehaving. Like a child left alone with a felt tip pen and a white wall. No dramatic rupture. No bang. Just a slow realization that the usual rules were no longer being observed. 

Clocks still worked. Calendars remained smugly sequential (bastards), but lived time the thing you actually have to occupy? That had started taking liberties. Hours stretched inappropriately. Minutes arrived in the wrong order. The future became vague, like someone had taken it off the menu but forgotten to tell you and the waiter. 

This is usually where people expect a Big Event. Trauma. Breakdown. Some narratively satisfying cause. “Showtime!” 

Prepare for disappointment. 

I simply can’t help you there.  

Time didn’t collapse; it frayed. And fraying is much harder to point at. Even more annoying, by the time you notice the fray, it’s too late. The damage is done. 

What I noticed first was that living had become a test of endurance. Things that should have been brief became intolerable. Things that should have been taxing became strangely inconsequential.  

Waiting detached itself from outcome.  

Anticipation lost its target.  

“Later” became an abstract noun. 

I did what most people do in these situations: I assumed I was doing it wrong.  

Well, first I ignored it, shoved these feelings aside, denied there was a problem and then, once my world had collapsed into the size of a small flat, assumed I was doing it wrong. I became aware that somehow, I was failing to manage myself properly. That time was still doing what it always did, and I simply wasn’t keeping up. Or sometimes, I was ahead. Nothing felt linear.  

We are out of phase, Time and I. 

We are taught to think of time as a kind of moral conveyor belt. It moves forward, you move with it, and if you don’t, something is wrong with you. Cause and effect. 

The idea that time itself might become unreliable, that it might warp, stall, or refuse to progress, is treated as a category error, a personal failing, or a glitch in the matrix. 

Unfortunately, lived experience is not obliged to respect this distinction. 

Or perhaps, fortunately. 

And when time stopped behaving itself, memory also began misbehaving. The past stopped receding politely and boxing itself away in easily accessible chunks.  

It loitered.  

It stalked. 

It was yesterday, today and tomorrow, not last week, last year, last millennium.  

The future, meanwhile, became spectral: present enough to haunt, absent enough to be useless.  

I’m writing here to describe that state without immediately trying to escape it. No fixes. No recovery arc. No inspirational lesson. Just an attempt to document what it’s like when time refuses to follow instructions. 

Consider this less a beginning, more of a lingering.