The white-spotted puffer fish (Torquigener albomaculosus), found off the coast of Japan, occupies itself with making a circular pattern on the sea floor. It burrows and scurries around to make a temporary base in the sand, astonishingly accurate in its geometry, hoping to draw the attention of another puffer fish that would be intrigued by the display. Once complete, the fish has to continuously tend to the design, as the moving tide will gradually wear away at the sandy ridges and even out the troughs, until all signs of it have vanished, along with the hopes of meeting another. The fish dedicates itself to its small construction site and ignores the surrounding void. There is no boundary—no wall—between this little perimeter of calm and the vast ocean. This is eternity for the fish, because it could never swim far enough to know that all the oceans are connected.

Human beings think our grasp of the world is broader than that of this fish, but there is a limit to how we understand our place in time. We remember what happened yesterday and plan for tomorrow. We are told our birthdays and can guess what the last decade of our lives will be. We read books about history. We carbon date. We run theoretical models of our beginnings to predict how this will all end, give or take a few million years. Telescopes look to the farthest reaches of the known universe, in the hopes we could escape this messy planet. The irony of searching deeper into this abyss for a solution to the impending future is that the further we look, the further into the past we’re seeing. Giant telescopes are perched upon mountains located far away from light-polluting cities, meaning that to even begin looking for a way out, we need to leave civilization behind. For now, we have no choice but to stay, wishing upon stars we increasingly can’t see.

The movement of time is rarely perceived as slow because the realization of change occurs upon its sudden recognition, and by definition these changes must be different enough from the present. They can be as significant as tracing Homo sapiens through our evolutionary branch to a different species, or as insignificant as throwing out leftovers because they’ve been in the fridge since Sunday and it’s Thursday now, not Tuesday, and that means they’re five days old, not two.

Hypothetically, if the little puffer fish could swim far enough, setting off in one direction, it would circle the globe and eventually reach the same point. All signs of its creation would be gone, eroded by the shifting tide. How would the fish understand that the floor comes back around to meet itself? Similarly, what if time did not have a beginning and an end but was looped in this way? Harold Ramis’s movie Groundhog Day (1993) depicts a world in which a short loop has comedic results, starting over every morning, conveniently with the previous day’s memory still intact. The moral of Groundhog Day is that we can learn from our mistakes, but only if we remember them. But what if this time loop were longer than memory, generations, or recorded history? And that time is constantly writing over itself, slowly churning, erasing all identifiable marks of the past? A time loop longer than species, longer than the lifespan of the suns and planets themselves?

Organisms that once lived in the ocean became sediment on the seabed, written over by new matter and later dredged to the surface, reincarnated as plastic. In 2018, researchers found a plastic bag in the Mariana Trench in the Western Pacific Ocean, the deepest point in the planet. Perhaps the bag had been trying to return itself, prevented from breaking down by the vast lifespan of its current incarnation, far greater than any of its previous lives. The metaphor of something being just a drop in the ocean would apply here, except the number of such drops is so massive they’ve already seeped their way into our diet: research done in the past few years has shown nearly all sea salt sold in UK supermarkets contains microplastics. I switched to buying Himalayan rock salt, as I figured the rock being mined is older than humankind and would therefore contain no plastic. It formed along the edge of the super continent Gondwanaland approximately 450–600 million years ago, predating the earliest dinosaurs by 200 million years.

The first synthetic plastic was patented in 1856. By 1870, that material became known as celluloid, the matter responsible for creating the film industry. What was once living was thermoformed into a new shape, becoming a carrier for the recording and playback of images. As a plastic strip, flexible enough to be pulled through the workings of Thomas Edison’s Kinetoscope, it displayed a small amount of sequential photographic frames, with each frame caught in its own present. The earliest copyrighted film, Fred Ott’s Sneeze (1894), was only five seconds long. These kinds of films, comprised of relatively few frames, were designed to be played back as loops to rapt audiences, queuing up to relive the same moment again and again.

Despite all of the advances in digital storage capacity, the way to store information for the longest timeframe is still made of plastic. Celluloid film was highly combustible and superseded by another plastic, acetate, which was in turn replaced by polyester. Polyester microfilm has the greatest lifespan of all archival formats: it is a plastic-based medium claimed to resist decay for approximately half a millennium. We are currently living at a time when we both rely on the longevity of plastics, yet are seeking to make them less permanent. Ultimately, we want to choose when our creations cease to exist.

I’m looking at the plastic wrapper of a supermarket lettuce, wondering where to dispose of it. It displays the cyclical recycling icon but with a diagonal red line through it. It reads “Not yet recycled”—as if the plastic is flaunting its presence, refusing to disappear now that its purpose has come and gone. We call some plastic “biodegradable.” A misnomer: any material will eventually break down if given enough time, whether it takes a few weeks or a few million years.

I called the owner of the bed and breakfast from the nearest city and mentioned that I was having trouble sourcing a satellite phone. They had one I could borrow, but that didn’t transpire when I arrived. The B&B pretty much was the town, except for a gas station which doubled up as a Chinese takeout. You paid for your gas at the same counter you ordered food at. The amount of people who stood around waiting gave the impression that there were either vast suburbs hidden away off the main road, or that there were few alternative dining options in the area.

From the B&B it was another four-hour drive to the next town. The night before setting off, the owner’s friend sat me down and put a radio in my hands. “Here’s a walkie-talkie, just make sure you’re on the right channel.” From the worried look on my face he explained further: “Oh, just…see this dial here?” He took the radio and pointed to a notched round gray dial on the top edge, “it will be sign-posted by the road, you can’t miss it, you’ll be fine. Press this button here on the side to talk. You’ll probably just hear the chatter of the truckers on the road. They talk among themselves all the time.”
“What do I do if I get a flat?”
The B&B owner chimed in, “Just radio one of the truckers. They’ll pass the message on back down to us. They all know me here. Just say you’re staying here.”
I continued querying the protocol, “Do I need to say over?”
He gave me a slightly impatient look “No you don’t need to say over.”
“Oh! And watch out for mushroom pickers!” the B&B owner said. “They drive like maniacs speeding, they’ll run you off the road! They come up here once a year around this time and they make the whole year’s worth of money in just a month.”
I looked at them blankly.
“You’ll be fine, it’s easy,” the friend said with a mixture of reassurance and annoyance, placing the radio back in my hands. I nodded while thinking I would immediately forget what I was meant to do.

The next morning, I rose at 6 a.m. and left quietly, passing the gas station/takeout and heading north on the highway. There were a handful of trucks and SUVs on the road. I continued about 20 miles until the highway became unpaved. The sonic contrast of the rumbling in the cabin compared to the smooth tarmac was startling, but a vehicle overtaking me at high speed and shooting stones into my windscreen in the process put my mind to rest that my truck would be ok handling it.

I looked for a gap in the thick wilderness on my left and turned off the highway, as per the instructions. This road went from the wide berth of the moderately used highway to a single-lane dirt road that was in danger of being swallowed by the sheer amount of dense foliage on either side. A dinged sheet steel sign announced itself prominently, bearing just a lone “1” in black on white. Next to it another sign: “NEW MOBILE RADIO CHANNELS BEING IMPLEMENTED ON THIS RESOURCE ROAD. RR-4.” The rusted edges had bled into the white painted surface, giving it an orange-brown border, proving that they had been there for some time.

I pressed the button on the radio and spoke in that weak voice when first waking, or practicing a speech when no one is around to hear it.
“Silver pickup, heading up…uh…mile 1”

And so the protocol began to seem clear: the road was so narrow, you needed to radio to the logging trucks to alert them of your presence. A truck with a full load of trees on its back wouldn’t be able to stop in time if you were coming the other way. Each mile marker by the side of the road bore a sequential number and you broadcast your position as you passed each sign, “heading up mile 2, mile 3, 4,” and so on.

The sat-nav showed my position somewhere off to the side of the road. Not on it, but following alongside somewhere in the dense woodland. The device was useless by this stage and I considered unplugging it and putting it in the glove compartment, but just having it on gave me a sense of comfort. I looked to the thick dark trees to my left and imagined my silver truck plowing through the thicket like a ghost-image travelling unhindered.

Knowing it was a long drive I queued up one of the longest albums I had in my iTunes. All six discs (though a “disc” is now a redundant unit) worth of The Basement Tapes reissue that came out relatively recently. Well, recently compared to when it was released in 1975, and even more so having been recorded in 1967. The story of this album: after Dylan recorded and released it in an abridged version, the original reel-to-reel tapes were discovered, having been forgotten in a closet for three decades. The tapes were given the modern-day treatment and the resulting fidelity was good, like wiping greasy spectacles with a fresh cloth. It was home-recorded music, intended to stay in a basement but somehow wound up in a closet. The newly released tracks were not intact, since some tapes suffered water damage and degradation over the years. Dropouts and gaps in music and words. Some sections were omitted as they were just distorted noise. Moments of music lost forever.

I continued using the radio at each mile, broadcasting my position, unsure it was even working, for two hours before I had any kind of response. The sound was scrambled and abrupt and I didn’t catch what was said. But 15 minutes later I saw a long truck full of trees pulled over. As I passed I waved and they said something to me on the radio which I once again couldn’t decipher. “Have a good one” I said.

By now the mile markers were getting harder to spot; some had been embraced by the surrounding wilderness, swallowed by the forest. Others were just missing.

I continued for another two hours until I reached the town, the road gradually winding further and further down to where the buildings were. After driving through a forest for four hours, the first buildings emerged out of nowhere. A sense of relief washed over me. The procession of detached row houses flanking my either side, welcoming me. Carrying down the gently curved road, I slowed at a stop-sign half-covered in moss. I rolled down my window, the silence telling me I was the only person here. It was then that I noticed a fox sat at the side of the road studying me calmly. I imagined it was wondering where I had come from. It didn’t look like any fox I had seen before. Its fur the color of rust on black. It was small, and although it was calm, it struck me that there was something slightly odd about it. It wasn’t afraid to hold my gaze endlessly, both of us staring at each other. It was clear there wasn’t anything this fox needed from me and I drove on. A moment later, I saw a car approaching. We slowed and I waved. “I’ve been expecting you” they said.

I’ll often re-tell the same story. I’m not too good with names either. Or faces come to think of it. I don’t mind really – I’m used to it. But I worry that I appear rude, and I don’t want to be rude.

I’ll usually tell by their expression that we’ve met before and I’ll say hello and ask a vague question to try to place them. Sometimes it dawns on me mid-conversation and if you knew to be looking, maybe you’d see this difference in my eyes. But it’s not uncommon for me to have whole conversations and walk away not knowing.

I worry about it sometimes. It reminds me of my mum. After my dad was gone, some mornings she would wonder where he was.

After the first couple of times I thought it would be better to tell a lie. This moment of deliberation was sidled with a heavy release: a slow sigh accompanied by a memory, and then I would see her smile.

I would make up reasons as to why he had gone out but would be back soon. These started off reasonably believable but later grew to be more elaborate and I found myself getting quite creative with explanations. I wouldn’t say I enjoyed telling the stories but it was some way to make light in the encroaching shadows.

The last time I went to visit my parents at the house where I grew up, I spent some time clearing out the cupboards of my old bedroom. Increasingly steeped in a strange sense of time this room kept my teenage life on pause and rendered ever more faded with each visit. For some time, its main use was for storing stuff that didn’t belong anywhere else, but now it was slowly transitioning into a becoming a guest room.

I moved a mattress, an ironing board, spare duvets and boxes of old plates out of the way of my cupboard. Sitting on the top shelf were several shoeboxes that I had not looked at since they were placed there. Each was filled with personal effects: Birthday cards, letters, mementos, gifts from exes. The markings on the outside of each box gave no indication as to its contents and inside there were things I didn’t recognise. Things I had been given or kept but I couldn’t remember from whom or for what reason. Objects that no longer connected and images depicting the way she looked like a stranger. This confrontation was as equally alienating as it was embarrassing. Some comfort was found in believing that I wasn’t this person anymore. But then again I knew I was responsible for these things still hanging around. At the time filling these boxes was a way to avoid throwing away things that meant something once. But then after a while it just became about laziness in not discarding them.

Looking at them I realised the oldest box had sat here for half of my own lifetime. The reason why I was now finally going through these boxes was because I was searching for a disc of pictures from a slightly later time in my life. In fact the disc contained the entire lifetime of my first digital camera but was misplaced. It annoyed me that I didn’t know where it was. I had looked everywhere else I could think and so thought I might have put it in one of the boxes.

While searching I noticed how the most recent shoebox coincided roughly with the time I had that camera, and that this last box was lighter and less filled than the others. Of course I was getting older and more able to deal with the drifts of relationships that mark adolescence but none the less there were no more boxes after this.

It’s not on the map

I felt a wave of relief, floating in the wake of the moment. Unfortunately, the distance was expanding and residual energy soon gave way to the open ocean of awkward silence. The starkness was electric. Overbearingly tense in the anticipation of some sound breaking the air.

We were both vying to evaluate the surroundings where we had crashed. It was an intersection. I was overarching and stretching my neck. I kept looking as if to give the impression to my younger companion that experience meant one should fully consider what was in front of them. It was still an intersection. Thoughts drifted and turned to the machinery ground to a halt. The cross road standing still. Dumb lights that weren’t lit. Monuments to what, I wouldn’t know.

I turned to watch my young companion disappear around the corner. Slowly I set off too. Feet crunching the soft matt dust, every now and then a rock or something would force me to find my footing. My mind wasn’t on the task, wasn’t engaged. Ambivalence crippled my will. We needed to find something important and I had a feeling this wasn’t it.

Turning the corner, an exposed part of the wall presented itself cracked and broken, with a truck half embedded. It hadn’ t rusted, which meant it must have happened at some point after. For this was a definitive sign of telling the time here; the weather systems had hailed and torrented relentlessly, giving everything they had until it just ran out and there was no more weather left. Now things didn’t age and the dry still air kept things as they were. Footprints remained in their place. It could have been here since a millennia or last week. It was hard to tell. I walked up to the truck door, it’s window broken, glass littering the seat, peering in.

What was it like?

What was it like? Images went by too high and too quick to latch onto. One came into view before another drifted in front of it, slow enough to recognise each thought but fleeting all the same. Speech remained firmly out of reach. The young one waiting quickly, then remained just waiting.

I opened my mouth to speak, but a much better point was made. This was as much to my surprise as to everyone else’s. Initially stunned, agreement followed. The first few exclaimed, “That’s it!” and then soon others “Yes, that’s the answer to this whole thing!” I was right but I didn’t realise why. Not straight away at least. In time I understood what I had said and like everyone else, agreed wholeheartedly. But I had not the slightest inkling of where the thought had come from. In fact, I intended to say something else, but a garbled mix of two sentences using mostly all the same words, but with entirely different meaning, was brought forth to unanimous praise.

Soon my words spread and so did their effect. Further afield at first, in a formation that felt like a growing puddle pushing out the periphery. When a video of the event surfaced, that puddle was smeared everywhere at once. In every pocket of each city, suburb and township, the ideas that those unauthored words had encouraged were proliferating in every forum that would hear them.

Commentators were referring to it as the ‘spark’. But unbeknownst to its followers it was a struck not like flint but like a fumbled cigarette igniting the bush that nonetheless spread into wildfire.

I realised the easiest option was to try to keep my mouth shut from then on. And I felt no shame letting others take what they wanted or needed from it – my words were ringing true and that was the main thing.

I have to admit though that it was very exciting. Flattering words were bestowed upon me and the personal and social benefits flowed. I was aware of time and as I continued to offer no new thinking, I became hypersensitive of people’s attention. I still felt responsible for a unity, to be at the forefront, but I was basking in a fading glow. Right when they expected the most, I had the least to give.