Musings on Time - Henry Bontempo

Time is a strange object on trips like this. You enter the plane at 5PM and it is dawn in Dakar 7 hours later, and this disorder then compounds when after another 7 hours, it is sunset in Johannesburg. You can barely remember when you watched Moana last night, and when you slept, probably because there is overlap between the two. You had slept for a few hours, dreams punctuated fractually by Dwayne Johnson and accompanied by a Mirandian score.

The next days are succinctly described as discombobulating, The jet lag is too significant to ignore; finding the most improvident times to project somnial desire. The sun rises impossibly early, and with it you go, forced to endure the day in a marionette-like fugue just as you had begun to sleep.  

This, however, will adjust itself, should you direct due time and due diligence to mutating your sleep schedule. For a few days, your perception of time is as it should be - slightly addled, but not copiously infringing on your academic and social abilities. But, just as you have enmeshed yourself into the South African temporal biome, your experiences accelerate. Days leap forwards and past you, and you are left with memories and images, but no corporeal recollection, no stamp of authenticity on yesterday. Your first experiences on the trip are cloaked in a permanent sepia, embalmed and enclosed within neurological amber. These middle days, though, lie incomplete, victims of an overzealous cerebral director who has scattered their components across the cutting-room floor. The remnants can hardly make a movie.

And then, suddenly, your incomplete highlight reel lurches into slow motion. Now, you can view your past explorations with novel depth, and, forgetful as you are, you can grip at least a semblance of your witnessed beauty firmly. Your alarm plays its default tone, and you are reminded of your fleeting time here. Having finally performed your archival vice upon your memories, you realize that you have little time to make any more. Soundly disheartened, you sleep into an unforgettable, South African dawn.