Eleven Minutes

Time is a consensus. I understood this abstractly before. I understand it viscerally now.

I was watching a candle when it started. The flame became a thing that was not moving but rather a thing that was changing — two different verbs that I had always conflated. Then the concept of flame became separated from the flame itself, the way a word sometimes loses its meaning if you repeat it long enough. I was left with pure phenomenon: light and heat and the chemical process, stripped of its label.

And then I was somewhere else.

There are no landmarks to report because landmarks require a geography, and what I entered had none. It was not dark and not light. It was not empty and not full. The nearest I can come is: it was a state of pure potential, unresolved, before any particular thing had been decided upon. I have since wondered if this is what cosmologists mean when they describe the moment before the Big Bang — not nothing, exactly, but a kind of maximum possibility that had not yet committed to being anything specific.

I existed there without edges. There was no boundary where I stopped and the space began. This should have been terrifying and instead was the most natural thing I had ever felt, which is perhaps the most destabilizing part — that the self, which I have spent my entire life constructing and curating and protecting, is actually optional. A convenience. A habit.

At some point something shifted — not a door opening, more like a key change in music, a movement into a new phase — and I was adjacent to a perception that I can only describe as size. Not physical size but ontological size. Whatever I was adjacent to was very old and very large in a way that had nothing to do with dimension. It was not threatening. It was like standing near a mountain in the dark. You are not afraid of the mountain.

Then I was back. The candle was still burning. Eleven minutes had passed according to the clock. I sat for a long time afterward without moving, not because I was incapacitated but because moving seemed like it would disturb something I wanted to keep still.

I still don't know what eleven minutes is. I'm not sure the question is well-formed.