In Search Of Lost Time

 What was once measured in ordinary intervals - morning light, a hurried meal, a passing conversation - is now stretched, broken, or stolen altogether. To live with chronic illnesses is to inhabit a different chronology, one that does not run parallel to the world's clock but winds inward, folding back on itself, darting suddenly sideways… eluding capture. Days blur into each other with their quiet rituals of medication, fatigue, treatment; infections and viruses blur them altogether. Moments slip away, half-lived or never lived at all.

I find myself perpetually searching for the time my conditions have taken. The hours when the body refuses to rise, the weeks tethered to a dialysis machine, the years altered in their trajectory by illness, surgery, or recovery. 

There are triggers - places, songs, fragments of conversations, that call up visions of another self - a life imagined, sometimes half-begun. It is not simply nostalgia, it’s an awareness that time itself has become fragile, and easily misplaced. In those split seconds of remembering or imagining it feels like a sinking… a mourning for a parallel life that from the moment I was born, continued on another path. I grieve those paths: a never-ending series of ‘sliding door’ moments at the time of each missed party or life-changing diagnosis.

I am always chasing after what might have been, gathering the scattered threads of my hours, and trying to weave meaning from the fragments.

Yet, in these searches for lost moments, both big and small, comes discovery. 

To be forced out of the world’s tempo is to notice its subtler magic… A quiet afternoon watching the sun from my garden or meandering slowly on the seafront reveals textures I might have otherwise rushed past; a single intact hour, free from lethargy, gleams with a brilliance that ordinary health might never grant. 

I can spend a stretched hour watching the sunlight, or moonlight, glint off the rippling waves; watch pale oranges turn electric pink as the sky erupts into a fleeting moment of colour and hope. I hold on tightly to these. 

There’s a strange and serene peace in the slowing of time; the world rushes past on its many endeavours: high octane, high blood pressure, fast pulse. Mine however has slowed, I’ve found a secret club in amongst the frenzy. My body has found a new quiet rhythm with the waves. 

I live in search of lost time. Not only to mourn it, but to reimagine it; to render absence into presence through the act of noticing it, and embracing it all. 

April 2026