November 26 — A steady tick threads through my unlit interior. It’s the noise of seconds, leaving little wet teeth marks on the minutes. It takes me several to remember the pocket clock on my bedside table. This old thing, made of plastic to look like a pink scallop shell—I’d found it two winters before at an antique store somewhere in Western North Carolina, then unearthed it from the jammed bottom drawer of my desk. Last night I thought I was only imagining the sound. Several days passed before I noticed the clock as a functioning object.
I get up and become aware of more sounds. I guess their sources and the unseen spaces they inhabit: I think that’s the din of a vacuum and its zagging trajectory across the carpet upstairs. The running of a toilet that is not mine. The intermittent drip of the bath faucet, which I cannot bear to look at, but know is leaving orange streaks of waste in the tub. Symphony of electric things already awake that never slept, never ceased. The morning proceeds and pulls the new day into focus with a rustling click, and that ambient stream tapers off to my mind’s ear. Those irrelevant things shuffle into the background as duties, tasks, and worries march in and declare themselves. I tap at my phone. I take the stable system of ongoing machinery for granted. I stop hearing the clock.
==
I’ve been thinking of attention again. That it has an architecture—tiered, like a cake, a precarious hierarchy of important and mostly abstract things. Rarely am I alone or quiet or still enough to offer mine up to anything but the task at hand. I’m surprised by these vacant stretches of time, when a train of thought has just stopped or not yet departed, and find myself fixating on nothings. A cobalt blue subway ad, someone’s thumb rubbing the metal pole. Raw material, discards: my impulse is to sieve them for meaning. But I can never determine exactly why they tripped my senses. I grasp around for more pertinent things to fill the agonizing space between destinations. I realize that these random moments of noticing never stick in my memory. They cannot be assigned enough humor or tragedy to calcify them into a complete story.
==
A commotion shakes me out of sleep. Even through my half-blindness, I can make out Carmine blurring rapidly around our bed, through the door, to the opposite wall and back. Harsh objects open and close, a light snaps on. What’s wrong? What is it? I’m trying to say, but my voice is muffled by sleep and I have to repeat myself three or four times. It takes a while for him to communicate that he’s disturbed by a strange sound. He doesn’t know where it’s coming from. Could be a bug, he frets, and I laugh when I point to the clock.
In the morning I rest my chin on his turned shoulder and whisper in his ear, you cannot stop the procession of time…. He smiles into dimples without opening his eyes.
==
Floods of stimuli are readily available, guaranteed when you decide to open a set of particular apps on your phone, or when you dare to leave the apartment and go out into the city. Over time, you build up defenses against them: attention is a limited currency, to notice too much would sap the necessary reserves. You assume control when you pop in your earbuds or close your eyes against the lights racing along the tracks, or you simply train your brain to tune the present trifles out. You fight inundation with compartmentalization. There’s an industry to it, machines you turn to to redirect the magnetic poles of your attention. Scroll, sleep, forget.
==
My airplane sleeping mask—my only defense against the constant streetlight burning through our stuck-open shutters—is wound around my neck. My two braids have become unraveled, hair ties vanished into the comforter’s dingy ether. The workday looms. I bury my face into the nook between Carmine’s shoulder blades, keep it there for a while. That shelter I love.
==
I come out of the dissociative haze on days when I feel more vulnerable. When I’m in states of desire, when I’m in love or in grieving, I’m more desperate to pattern the ordinary. Nothing is excluded from the field of my attention. To look at anything, anyone, hurts. I can’t stop it. It is hard to imagine a flood evaporating, even if it inevitably—and impossibly—does.
==
The week in January I bought the clock, we were stopped by a closure on the parkway and tried to take a shortcut through a mountain. I swore I could discern some off-roads, faint capillaries through the gray matter in a map on my phone before we lost service completely. Endlessly we scaled steep inclines, wound around swaths of blank snow and felled black trees. Everything looked the same. The diversion had been my fault, it was my idea to waver off of the two-hour alternate route the app suggested in favor of improvisation (desire path). I became tense and argumentative in my shame. At some point a dog stopped us in our tracks, blocking the road with incessant barking. We noticed a few houses nestled back in the wood. A man approached our car, and Carmine rolled the window down to ask for directions. I seized his arm. His assumption that all people living in rural areas are naturally friendly irritated me. My prejudices were only more slightly specific than his: of anyone, it was Appalachian off-the-gridders who frightened me the most, with their guns and guarded properties. Strangely, I cannot remember what the man said to us or if we’d ended up speaking to him at all. I do not remember how we found our way back. Only those inhospitable shelves of snow, the dog, the window, the arm. The clock ticking somewhere, more patient than me.
==
Poet Alice Fulton in her essay Screens:
The heart scares me because I can feel its importance physically. Most of the body's major organs are more reticent: the brain hums along so quietly that the ancients believed thought lived in our noisy hearts. Now, of course, the heart symbolizes emotion, not analysis. Each beat offers another chance for revelation. Repetition can take on a powerful beauty if it manages variation while retaining the residue of its original meaning.
I wonder if all anxious children feared the intervals between their own heartbeats. Like a draining battery, that it would suddenly stop the machine. I still hate to notice my own.
==
Carmine observes that the needle hand on the clock is slightly delayed: it takes longer than a second for it to move. I wonder if that’s why, whenever I look at it, the hands appear motionless. I haven’t given it my attention for more than a second.
Since I’ve started writing this, a new development has emerged. The clock is no longer ticking. No motion, no sound. I’d been convinced that its noise was constant, and interested in the fact that I rarely noticed it, and how totaling that noticing was. Telltale heart. Sanity-threatening. I can’t figure out what causes it to stop or begin ticking, but I’m convinced it’s not a dead thing yet.
==
I’ve been thrashing around and moving blindly. Could be bravely. I’m surprised when I’m rewarded by my impulsive, uncalculated actions—although they have always rewarded me. In moments of stasis I have to remind myself to fling myself over a ledge to begin again. Act out of character. The unknown, and all of my aversions, have the seductive force of a black hole opening.
Seamus Heaney in “Lightenings ii,”
Sink every impulse like a bolt. Secure the bastion of sensation. Do not waver into language. Do not waver in it.
===