Suspended in Time
Hello dear readers! Due to an ever-stacking pile of commitments, urgent assignments I forgot to do until the night before, and extreme writer’s block, I admittedly have not been writing as much as I used to. However, I am here to grace Medium with my presence once more. You’re welcome, everybody. (That was sarcasm in case you couldn’t tell)
Right now, it’s currently Break. Don’t ask me which one — our school system has a 1 week break every couple months or so, and after a while, it all starts to blur together. The same staring out the window into the backyard, the same hum of the heater or air conditioner harmonizing with the ticking of the clock. Everything is silent and loud, bright and dull. It feels like rocking back and forth on a ship, the days fading into nights and popping back up into mornings again. Time compresses and expands like a slinky — 9am, then 11am, then 2pm and 4 and 6 slip by like thieves under the cloak of night.
Sitting on the couch, looking at the way the pale sunlight glides off the wood furniture in my home, I’m always reminded of a time that will forever live in a small corner of my mind. It’s not so much an event as an ambience, I would say — kind of a like a collage of images, colors, words, and emotions, all jumbled up in my mind to produce a Feeling™.
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The first and foremost color in my mind is a deep, warm, caramelly auburn. It’s the exact color of autumn sunlight hitting polished wood. It sounds like a viola — reverberating, unique in its not-high yet not-low tone. While not cloyingly sweet, it glides across your tongue and bottoms out in a natural, honey-like finish. The exact representation of that color can’t be summarized in just a hex code, or a frequency, or a flavor profile. It’s many things simultaneously, and yet none of them at the same time.
What follows is a collection of sensations. The chilly breath of wind brushes past my cheek, but I don’t shudder. The sunlight is warm enough, and the multicolored leaves on the ground make up for whatever visual warmth it doesn’t cover. I sit in the backyard, looking around at the same familiar trees and plants. They’re usually bony and bare, the majority of the leaves having fallen to the beige lawn with the advent of winter. I like them that way, though. The twisting and winding of the branches towards the sky paints a far more visually interesting picture than the puffy, voluminous shapes the trees don with their leaves.
Where I see myself sitting always changes — sometimes it’s the cushiony new chair set we got, sometimes it’s the much-loved and worn out metal and fabric seats, and sometimes it’s the big green tent we put up one summer. Either way, the feeling is the same. I close my eyes, and the light hits my eyelids. It’s a color I’m hesitant to describe, since there’s no way I could do it justice. The closest I’ll get is this: the warmth of someone’s hug, of freshly made food, of watching a carefully tended flower start to bloom, of the very first sip of tea. The sun, the wind, the rustling of the leaves all blend into an ambience. It diffuses through the moment like a scentless perfume, carrying with it not a smell, but a feeling. They say, after all, your memories have the strongest association with your sense of smell.
When I step inside, the toastiness on my skin evaporates into the shade. It doesn’t leave behind a chill, though. It’s refreshingly cool, like a breath of crisp autumn air after spending all day in front of a heater. The strongest associations of this feeling come from COVID times, where I would spend most of my time between my room and, well, my room. Occasionally, I would step outside into our backyard or even — *gasp* — go and get the mail. It was incredibly isolating at times, but I don’t remember feeling too devastated over it. Part of that could be due to the unrestricted internet access that I had, which lead to hours upon hours of doing anything but studying. However, for the most part, I didn’t feel too empty because I had my family with me. I had hobbies like baking, crocheting, and writing. I could keep in touch with my friends through shared Word documents that we would fill with memes and jokes about our classmates. Maybe I’m looking at the past with a rather rosy lens, but that period of my life didn’t seem full to the brim of the tormenting boredom that many people reference when they talk about the lockdown.
Instead, I remember a restlessness below the surface that always seemed to be simmering but never quite reaching a boiling point. The wind blew at the fallen leaves as if urging them to flutter about once again as I paced back and forth on the patio, breathing in the evening air. Time was frozen and the world had come to a standstill — but the Earth kept turning. Seasons kept changing, my thoughts and my experiences kept changing, and yet the staticness of that moment still stands out to me like a flash of lightning. Change and continuity, the two contrasts that were forced to merge together at that point in my life, pulled at my senses and stretched it like taffy. I was nostalgic for the past, and I was anxious for the future. I was glad to leave behind the troubles of school and social interactions, but at the same time, I missed them terribly. I hated learning online, but I simultaneously got access to an entire world I didn’t know existed. The contradictions, the discomfort, and the instability swirled together and became a crackling fire, fueling the restlessness that powered my pacing feet.
Now, when I think back of those times, I look at with a curious gaze. The dazed, not-sweet yet not-bitter emotions I had then would never return to me. They lived in the autumn sunsets, in the sunlight that hit the wood floors and made them glow caramel. However, every once in a while, when the weather turns cold again, I take out that box of feelings and revisit it, polishing off all the memories that had turned dusty. And when I hold each one of them up to the light, they, too, glow with a deep amber hue.
