I looked at this thing and saw that I hadn’t posted in six days. That never used to happen. I don’t know how fast time passes right now, I don’t have any way to measure these things, but I know that it passes swiftly and cleanly, like a little bird diving through the air, and there isn’t any friction at all, and then it’s just gone, like the way money can just be gone when you spend it without paying any attention. Last night in your bed I was trying to think of the way I used to describe that phenomenon, the phenomenon of time changing speeds in different contexts, but I couldn’t remember the word. I only know that some things are fast like a hummingbird is fast, and some things are slow like a tree is slow, and other things are somewhere in the middle. And you are fast like a hummingbird, and I am slow like a tree. And you told me that the latin root of your name means hummingbird. And we were both so tired but in a funny, laughing way and not in a weary, sad way, and you were leaving at four a.m., and I was driving you to the airport in your cluttered station wagon with the headlight out so I have to drive with the brights on, but it’s an old car so the brights just seem like regular headlights. And I lay on your bed as you packed, watching you stuff ten hundred t-shirts into your bag, and feeling a sort of endless curiosity towards you, like I wanted to turn you over and inspect you, figure you out like a little mechanical toy. And your fastness and my slowness, like two separate currents in a stream- yours high and rippling and filled with fractured light, and twigs and leaves, and movement, and little water striders and the broken reflection of the plants along the streambank. And mine is down deeper, slower, like cold honey pouring from a mason jar, or the otherworldly flowing of glaciers down a mountain’s face, or window-glass rippling downward, being liquid. Or like a tree, which speaks only one kind of truth over hundreds of years, and doesn’t bother with the intricacy of seconds. And you! You are a metronome of seconds, the intricacy of all the forest’s creatures, the static and drama of life. Dear lover! If we were shapes over time I would be the grand canyon, and you would be the infinite minutia of the night sky. I would be the pounding of niagara falls and you would be a sunset full of mayflies, blinking into being every second, and living furiously, and dying, and then doing it all again.

But that is not what I set out to describe! I only wanted to tell about you, in your sweatpants, arms swathed in freckles, hands square, fingernails neat, folding t-shirts, packing. And me on your bed, surrounded by unread books, so firmly stuck in the present I may have just been born. And each time I see your face, I am surprised. You exist! You exist!