The Best American Essays 2015 by Ariel Levy

who have never taken pills of any kind, vitamins included, now find myself every morning laying out—and
taking pleasure
in doing so—a lovely long row of differently sized and colored shapes on a placemat in front of me. I’ve watched my parents doing this for years, but now I finally understand. Though the most minor sort of doing, this is, health matters aside, one distinct and symbolic gesture, a token ordering applied to what is now understood to be a vast undivided expanse of time.
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    The days—mornings and then long afternoons . . . People ask, “How do you pass the time?” and though I usually answer glibly in the moment, I find myself getting stuck on the question when I’m alone. The words make less and less sense as I consider. The idea that there is this great intangible entity that we are all of us—the convalescing ones maybe particularly—passing through or in some way channeling through ourselves, and that this entity is somehow singular, as in
the
time. I know it’s a casual figure of speech, not a reasoned proposition, but all the more reason to ponder it. For it is in terms of the assumed and collectively accepted logic of such phrases that we live and take our basic bearings. “How do you pass the time?” suggests the basic model of existence, in which living a life is seen on the one hand as traversing an unspecified span of time—marked out in years—and on the other as moving through the natural cycle of hours, from dawn to dusk. Time, then, is understood to be a medium one negotiates. And in this respect, how
do
I pass the time? Well, I suppose that I pass it in various ways—reading, writing notes, napping, taking walks, eating . . . And as it happens, each of these things gives me a different feeling about time. There is the sense of distended pause that I have when I am sitting in place, thinking or writing; and there is the more marked-off, syncopated rhythm of mailboxes and driveways and birds fluttering up into the trees when I go walking. And the almost otherworldly silence that comes over me in these rooms, when I just sit at the table and let the gaze pan from the corner all the way across—taking in the framed photos of the kids on top of the shelf, the bowl of stones gathered on the Truro beaches, the clay pitcher borrowed straight from a Morandi canvas, and then the big mirror on the far wall, which holds these same objects captive in its smooth silver depth. Mirrors create silence, I think. I make a note. Other afternoons I have that feeling that is like floating slowly through the air sometimes when I close my eyes and just listen to the sounds around me. These—and so many others—are the ways I
pass
the time, or ways that the time passes through me. They are also the different ways I am, and now I have to wonder what time even has to do with it.
    The drugs, the painkillers, though mild in their effect, do make a difference. They introduce a set of new variations into the old picture. I take the little yellow pills at given intervals and I have quickly come to know their working. Though the time of the day might flow in these different ways, the cycle of medications sketches over that flow a grid of definite expectations, and these delineate the day, much as do meals, appointed times for exercises . . . I know that after just four hours, the effect of the little pill will start to wear off. I will feel heavier, more aware of the sore part of my body; I will notice, too, an unpleasant, edgy, gnawing sensation, and when this arrives the mind begins to cast around for relief. Too early for the pill—so says the plan—though I’m not above negotiating with myself, and at times I nearly capitulate. I invent a reason why this occasion, now, is a special case—but no, the logic of the slippery slope most always prevails, and I go looking for distraction instead. I decide to shave, and