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espantado

from the blog of elmaschingon

El Espíritu No Sabe De Tiempo

Wednesday, February 22, 2006

I wore a watch to sleep because I never knew when I couldn’t sleep in the middle of the night, and I’d toss y turn, then stare at the ceiling before I’d check what time it was. I’m not one for big alarm clocks. “It’s 2:49 am,” I told myself.

I used to contemplate the reason why I’d wake up at this precise time. Was it the exact time I died in some other lifetime? Or perhaps, it was at this time that my spirit fled my body. “Estas espantado,” me derian los abuelos. “¡Apurale, mujer!” la abuela yelled at mamá, “Dame un huevo y esa yerba.”

A friend once told me she went to see a fortune teller, you know, the ones that read your hands, the cartas and own large statues of both Catholic saints and death. Her parents made her visit the fortune teller after she’d randomly lose track of time, suffered from insomnia, and whenever she found sleep, she’d awaken feeling just as tired and haggard as she felt before. It wasn’t depression, my friend told me, it was el espíritu, the soul.

“What about your soul?” I asked.

“Estoy espantada,” she said,”I’ve been for such a long time, that my spirit has a tendency to leave my body even when I do fall asleep.”

“Is that why you feel like shit when you wake up?” I asked.

“Yes, that’s why I feel like shit when I wake up,” she grins, “fucker.”

I ask her to clarify (the whole spirit stuff), since she hasn’t explained what that has to do with time.

“The spirit knows no time. It can come and go as it pleases. Some people have more control of it than others, pero, answer this,” She tells me, “Have you ever seen yourself sleeping?”

I tell her, perhaps, in a dream.

“What if it isn’t a dream?”

I stare at her. And she continues.

“What if that’s really your espiritu watching itself as it returns?”

“¿De donde?” I say with a smirk, “If my spirit is having more fun at night than I am, and this is why I can’t sleep, then I want to be where my espiritu is.”

“You are,” my friend says.

“I’m in two places at the same time?” I ask.

“There is no time!” She says, and rolls her eyes.

“Answer me this then,” I tell her, “So, if there’s no time, then why do I feel I have to be in control of it?”

“You know for someone who believes in ghosts and aliens, you’re more a Scully than a Mulder,” she says.

On one of those nights, when I couldn’t sleep, I grabbed my journal and wrote: When I take my watch off, time isn’t bound to me.

I understand I’m not in control. That watch, is just a safety net, allowing me, with a glance, to direct me to what I should be doing. There are days when I feel that time is at it’s end of its tether, each strand tattering inch-by-inch, I lose it. I’m angry, sensitive, scared, defensive, and anxious all at once. I tell myself that it doesn’t make sense, nothing makes sense. I can’t even breath, the air is thick as if a rag is over my face (where the hell is my inhaler?)…like I’m drunk without even drinking.Se me cierran las puertas, here, now—there is no time.

¿Estoy espantado? My spirit out of the body and it can’t come back in?

But I go about my day trying to ignore this pagan feeling—más Scully que Mulder, my ass. Then it hits me, the fact that I have less time than I did yesterday.