Time is like water, friend
My kink is turning up for the train a full half-hour beforehand, I tweeted a few weeks back. I was en route to Washington DC, to watch a play and then participate in a panel about fanfiction and politics. I was only slightly exaggerating in my tweet — getting to train stations and airports and bus terminals long before my scheduled departure time does not get me hot, exactly. But it does fill me with a psychic calm that is adjacent to getting hot. Like, those feelings live in the same village, you know? I enjoy the sensation very much. It makes me feel powerful and embiggened. So cromulent.
For a segment people like me, which is to say the children of chronically late parents, tardiness is something both achingly, tenderly familiar and a state we try to avoid. My mother is the queen of lateness; thrillingly late, almost always, and not even really apologetic about it. To the people who say lateness is a sign of a lack of respect for the other person/people, allow me to introduce my mother. She loves and respects you, she just happens to think of time as a very fluid thing. Time is like water to my mum, and who is to say what is too much or too little? An ocean exists just handily as a kettleful; each has a purpose, neither is wrong, I get there when I get there. That's my mother's (unspoken, poorly paraphrased by me) time philosophy. Not mine. She is a charming woman in general, and that helps, I think — nobody except doctors working under tight NHS rules ever chastises my mother for being late. All through my childhood, I would skate in under her wing, late but excused. My mother's gift, being late, is to be a delight. It hasn't failed her yet.
As I get older, I am becoming more and more like my father, who is a man seemingly born under a clock, and with a timer sewn into his skin. My father still recalls bus schedules from decades past, and if he could sleep in the airport the night before a flight, he would be pumping up the air mattress right this second. Time? Time is the law for my father, and I remember his many sighs as my siblings and I sat in the car, dad looking frantically at the house and calling my mum's name, a mantra on his lips. "Time factor, time factor!" For all the many mysteries of my parents' long union, the time thing is one of the more baffling ones. On this issue, they seem to me to be like a tree married to a cloud; one forever tethered to the ground but reaching up towards the other, forever. Honestly, I cannot see how, but they have made it work for longer than I have been alive, so what do I know? Theirs is a mixed marriage, and the kids are a little confused as a result: my youngest brother is my mother's tardy clone; my other brother is my father's foot-tapping mini-me. My sister and I are sometimes late, but always with good intentions (except when it comes to rail or air travel).
Anyway. I got on that train that Saturday afternoon, neck relaxed and shoulders loose. Once in my seat, coat carefully folded and stowed, and my laptop and phone charger in my lap, I waited for the train to pull out of the station.
When it did, my toes curled with pleasure.