KRONOS

 July 2nd, 2026

I am reflecting on time a lot these days. Since I have so little of it to myself now, each minute feels ever more precious. One minute a few weeks ago was no big deal, and now a minute is a matter of life or death damn near. If I am one minute late, I miss my subway, I miss my train, and that sets me back at least a half hour. At least. There's an urgency that this city breeds into you. I'm not liking it so much. I always thought I would. 

I'm not used to conceptualizing my life in that way. It never used to hit deep when people would say something was "a waste" of "time" - time wasn't quite as finite as it is now, and so it felt like overkill, and to be honest, a little pretentious. These days, I am starting to get it. You can only be so many places at once. I structure my time a lot better now. For instance, we had a heat wave today in the city. I left around 1:50PM, made it just in time for the subway, and by the time I got off, I had a few minutes to kill, so I walked into an eyeglasses store. The attendant was in over her head, so I looked around briefly, and then left. The train I was aiming to take didn't have any transfers, and so I basked in that for the duration of my commute. Right after, I was tired, but I still went home and got things together to do my laundry, and then did part I of my food shopping, and tomorrow I'll do my meal preps, and gather a few outfits for the week, and then I'll clean my room, and get my car cleaned, and return this perfume I'm not too fond of, and then plan out my finances, and then the Summer will practically be beyond me, because it's all go-go-go once we get past the Fourth of July. 

Up until recently, I used to pray for time to speed up. I felt like I was suffocating in that house, and hoped the air would get less dense if time sped up some. The time is speeding up, and I suppose it is easier to breathe, but I miss that heavy, dense air, sometimes. My lungs are used to overperforming, and now that the resistance has eased up some, I just don't know what to do with myself. I'm flailing a bit, wondering if I look silly heaving when the climate no longer requires me to. 

In a little over thirty days, twenty five will be upon me, and I am trying to figure out how I feel about it. A certain loneliness has washed over me in the past month. Ever since the day I was banished from my cozy loft on Iris Avenue. Seems with me came this heavy longing that is otherwise suppressed and rejected. A longing for companionship. The sort of companionship that perhaps only exists at the back of my mind (Neptune ruled 5H & 7H) and can't ever be reached by a living, breathing person. I wanted it to be [redacted] and I think of him often. Before him, it was [redacted] - I swore the moment I saw him in that art gallery that he was the model companion, because I felt he mirrored me in all of the right ways, and yet that didn't pan out at all. He wanted nothing to do with me, and the chapter came and went. 

I didn't really know what I wanted this entry to be about, but I think I reached flow state (LOL) - a culmination of many passing thoughts that somehow fuse together. 

I've been doing well with staying clean and organized. I guess I am working on me. I'm also doing better with sleep, and my overall habits. I'm no longer asking if things could've gone any differently with my previous job, I'm accepting it for what it is and grateful for where it has taken me. I didn't know that things could be so good, nor that I could be on the receiving end of so much more. I guess I have a tendency of selling myself way too short. I don't take as much as I deserve, unless it's by force, and even then, there's a tendency to get pulled into the extreme, because I am feasting after living through a famine. I question whether or not that makes me a safe person for others to be around. Extremists are not typically safe people, though it's not conscious, it's just a blindspot that they have. I'd like to say I'm being mindful, but I don't fully know how to, so I am just as clueless as the unnamed extremist I am separating myself from. 

Back to breathing - another reason why I am afraid is because I've built up all of this capacity for suffering and powering through, and now, somehow, it's really not needed. In fact, it is highly discouraged. I'm in a quiet room, and I can't stop heaving all over the place and disrupting people. I can't help it. I spent so many years in that house fighting for every once of oxygen, to have so much of it readily available almost feels like a trick. I am afraid it'll be snatched from me, so I am heaving to take in as much of it as humanly possible. And yet, taking in heaps for the next ten minutes won't do much, I can't save it for later. All of it has to be used and cleared systematically. There's no conservation in this instance, so I am heaving for no reason. 

Gosh, I guess I have to just sit and bask in all I worked so hard for. This is the later I worked towards for all of those months. I'm here, now. It feels oddly terrifying to sit in that. 

Anyway, I understand it now what it means to respect one's own time. It's a finite resource. 

I didn't get it before, but I do now. 

- vetiveroil