Any time, day or night in Las Vegas, for forty dollars and eighty-nine cents, I can purchase a carton of Timeless Time cigarettes.
There is a violence, a compressed ambient violence, to the creeping of minutes, the marching of hours, the racing of years.
Trauma stops time, attained rhythm collapses.
For survivors, time starts over, it resets. What came before becomes separate. Time commences with the disaster. What came before becomes irrecoverable.
Cut off by catastrophe, time begins with that traumatic moment, and proceeds into what?
We don’t know.
The once-promised future now becomes the past, cycles are broken, rhythms destroyed. Time proceeds into the unknown, like a rock tossed into the abyss. Time becomes a wound.
Catastrophe is eternal. Life changes, no longer cyclic, seasonal, but segmented, the present adrift in the void, disappearing into the dead past.
Or is the past alive? In an infinite line of present moments in a long, brightly lit hallway with a single door at the end.
A hall decorated with pasts calling out, pasts demanding redress, pasts existing in the present as demands, shouting, pulsating, guiding us toward damnation or redemption.
Desert Dweller 