(This can be read as a casual poem where words do not have meaning. This is a valley where your thoughts may or may not flow through.)
Is 25, 25 years?
It is not like when I was much younger. Since a while ago maybe, this has been the case, about the turnover of years.
The feeling of a year has been progressively disjoining from the numbers.
1997 was a year. 1998 was one too. The definition seemed to be clear at that age.
A year should be how a year feels like. There should be things happening in it. A few things for each day or each week. The length of a week is stretched out by the filling of things.
The progression of each month thus becomes memorable, as if it is a person with a story. A story that is anchored at an abstract sequence of the so-called weeks, whose tempo was made salient by the turnover of things. It is through the deflection of month, a sequence gains its simultaneity.
2014 is not a year, neither was 2013, 2012, 2011 - if the feeling of year is part of its definition that has been held constant since I was 8.
I'm reluctant to call them years since there was not one thing that happened in them.
The recent turning of numbers, not years - like the rising turbulence from the heated deposits of memory, is not yet, if it is ever going to be, one complete movement.
What is a thing? What slows down or speeds up the progression of numbers as time contemplated backwards. What made them distinguishable from each other.
Maybe it is my definition of "thing" has changed. A younger me would take events in a smaller time scale as a thing. And the scale becomes larger as I becomes older.
Then I recalled how I named a number a year. It is not that I can remember, describe, identity what the things in it were like. There is nothing that I can say about them except the feeling of a year, justified by the feeling of things and the tense in between, when they are all projected into the past.
If the feeling is always a part of, if not all of, its definition.
A thing should be what a thing feels like. What holds constant since I was much younger.
Then it is not that I have changed my definition of a thing, but the numbers that were not in the thing had changed their tempo - the swarm of numbers agitated by the pacing up of the stars, the sun, the moon, the flowing of temperature and colors.
What is it to be 25? If I say it's eventually going to 50, it is as if there is time lying ahead equally spaced as what there was before.
But if the turnover of this life is also with the speeding up of the stars, the sun, the moon, temperature and colors. The next 25 is not the same amount of years as the 25 before, if a year should be what it feels like. Then I have lived the majority of my life.
I have always had lived the majority of my life.
But are the stars, the sun, the moon, temperature and colors turning faster? Or when they are projected backwards in time, there will be a point where their slowing down is justified by the salience of a year.
Isn't it more like - whenever I try to grasp the so-called past, the so-called "thing" shrinks in time and multiplied in number, while the rest is elongated in time and reduced in number. As the world projects backwards in time, two parts of the world have distinct trajectories of distortion and drift apart. There is only a regime where the feeling of a year lives. It gives simultaneity to what it lives on.
What is, then, becoming 25? If I am the person who is becoming 25, who has also had the 24, 23, 22, and if a person lives on things as a year does, I have been being born and killed at every moment. A previous me is always severed by the dislocation between the size of things and the size of the rest.
But wait. Maybe being me is just how being me feels like. The feeling is part of, if not all of its definition, and is held constant. As that of a year. As that of a thing.
Then when I am projected backwards in time, I was not a person. I was fragments scattered in the distorted things as they syncopate and interfere with the rest - familiar but not intimate.
I becomes 25 as if have just woken up from a dream, as if there is more reality lying ahead, compared to what is scattered before.
I have always had just woken up from a dream, if, at the end, a dream is the scattering made by the waking.
If the past should just be how the past feels like, 25 is just a fine gradient of scattering. Becoming 25 is the making of 24.
The numbering of years is to overcome the sharp sense of being born, as the numbering of age is to overcome the sharp sense of waking up.
