Acceleration Waltz

By Matias Travieso-Diaz

 

"The truth is, I've been lucky. But just like the waltz, life has its own rhythm of rise and fall." Len Goodman

 

The first time Brian noticed that time was playing tricks on him happened around Christmas, the year he turned thirty-five. He, his wife Ellen, and their two young children were setting up the Christmas tree by bringing down from the cellar the storage boxes with the ornaments and the lights, emptying the boxes on the living room floor, and getting ready to decorate the fir tree that Brian had purchased the day before.

It was a much-repeated ritual, which nonetheless was fun because it involved everyone in the process of carefully snaking the light wires around the tree branches and then engaging in good-natured arguments as to the proper placement of the multitude of colored balls, wood animals, candy cones, stars, ribbons, and other decorations.

Even Alfie, the family’s golden retriever, got involved in the exercise, wagging its tail and barking in approval at a child’s daring move to hang the big angel on the top branch of the fir. It all usually took an hour, two at the outside.

Brian was not keeping track of the duration of the tree-lighting ceremony or the elaborate dinner that followed to celebrate the success of the venture. However, when he later poured himself a cup of coffee and sat on his recliner to catch a short rest, he felt surprisingly exhausted. He closed his eyes for a moment and only reopened when Ellen pressed his shoulder: “Wake up, darling, it’s time to go to bed.”

He proceeded groggily upstairs but, as he was changing into his pajamas, he was assaulted by a disquieting thought: Where did the day go? It seemed as if he had gotten up only a few hours before and had gone through the usual motions of a weekend day: breakfast, reading the paper, watching the morning news, taking Alfie out for a walk, sweeping the sidewalk, cutting off dead branches from the front yard maple, having a bite for lunch, setting up the Christmas tree.

His activities did not seem to add up to a full day, and yet the night table clock declared with electronic finality: 11:17 p.m. It did not seem possible, but an entire day had gone by.

Brian lay in bed, unable to sleep. Unwittingly, random memories from his childhood kept rising in his mind. He was in fifth grade and his desk was close enough to a window that he could see the school backyard, where students were released to play at the end of the day.

During the most boring classes – math, history, geography – he would stare at the empty yard and agonize, waiting an eternity for the time he could go out. Then he was finally set free, he and the other students would exit and run, liberated, to play ball for hours, until it got dark and he had to mosey back home for dinner, homework, tv serials, games with his siblings.

Each day, particularly in the summer, seemed to extend forever, from the moment he got up until his mother forced him back into bed in the evening.

How was it possible that so much could be packed into the days of his childhood, so that those days seemed to last forever? And how could their memory remain so fresh, as if they had occurred only yesterday instead of twenty-five years before? He could not reconcile the disparate thoughts and recollections; after a while, he gave up trying and sank into troubled sleep.

Brian kept working as a post office clerk until his retirement at age 65. He hardly ever pondered on the vagaries of time or wondered whether the perceived length of his day was compressing.

Like many retirees, he was often bored, a feeling that made the hours progress slowly, but then he took up painting as a hobby and supplemented his lack of talent with diligence; these artistic efforts allowed him to fill his waking hours with activity.

More years passed and he woke up one morning, ready to celebrate his eightieth birthday. No sooner had he risen from the table after breakfast when he was summoned to sit down again for a special lunch cooked by his wife and served to him, his children and grandchildren and their spouses.

Again, he was barely able to return to the bedroom for his customary nap when he was nudged by his wife to come downstairs and blow the fat candle on his birthday cake.

He was unsure whether he had gotten around to eating a slice when he felt quite tired and went upstairs again. There, before somnolence overtook him, he revisited the strange sensation that had troubled him years earlier.

It seemed as if he had only been able to experience a smidgen of all that had happened that momentous day; it was as if his life was captured in a film reel that was being played over and again at increasingly rates of speed.

Not only was he unable to savor each clip reflecting an important (or trivial) event in his eighty years, but he was not sure whether the reel contained the entire story; he feared that much was being lost in each increasingly fast replaying.

He wondered “where did all the time go?” and realized with horror that, while his memory might be to blame for being increasingly faulty, there might be a deeper truth behind the seeming compression of his life.

As his remaining days dwindled, the number of new events or activities became smaller and there might be less stuff worth remembering. The same way he had trouble recalling the boring movies he had once watched, his memory was perhaps becoming more selective, storing away only the most important bits of each day.

Where would it all end? Was it that another word for dying was running out of meaningful time?

Brian closed his eyes and, as he sank into sleep, he promised himself he would consider the matter further when he next woke up. If he did.

 

Born in Cuba, Matias Travieso-Diaz migrated to the United States as a young man. He became an engineer and lawyer and practiced for nearly fifty years. After retirement, he took up creative writing. Over one hundred and eighty of his short stories have been published or accepted for publication in a wide range of story anthologies, magazines, blogs, audio books and podcasts. Four anthologies of his stories have also been published.