Present Perfect

Present Perfect (verb tense)
[has/have + been + present participle]
Ex: I have been hoping.

The other day I was talking to someone about an essay I wrote just over a year ago.  I always thought the essay was a contemplation on love but they said it was about time.  Maybe love is about time.  I first had this thought two months ago, when my best friend and her boyfriend of seven years came to visit me in New York.  Sitting across the table from them during dinner, I noticed how each carried the history of the other in themselves.  They were a movable measurement of seven years (and counting) of each other’s lives.  Mapped across my best friend’s memory was every small injustice, every accomplishment, every childhood story of her boyfriend.  In in him, was a record of every hardship she had endured, everything she had built for herself and everything they had built together.  In the two of them, I saw also the absence of time—or, perhaps, the irrelevance of time.  In the beginning, they would have counted dates—first date, second date…  And then months.  And then firsts—first time sleeping together, first Valentine’s day, first vacation together, first anniversary…  And then as they began to count years, the years added up to timelessness.  Because it is all there simultaneously in their memories of each other. 

I think a lot about time.  In job interviews lately, I find myself repeatedly asked, “Where do you see yourself in five years?”  In five years I will be twenty-eight (almost twenty-nine) years old.  In interviews, I make up an answer.  In conversations with friends, I laugh and say I can’t possibly picture where I’ll be in five years.  That’s a lie too.  I know where I want to be in five years, I just don’t want to say it.  It feels like a wish—if you tell someone what you wish for, it won’t come true.  And yet, in some ways it’s difficult to picture myself a year from now.  In fact, it’s difficult to picture two months from now.  But that is because I know how time moves slowly until suddenly it jumps and starts running until it gets tired.  Time needs to learn to pace itself.  It seems that big changes happen suddenly.  Love happens suddenly.  One day you just realize it’s there, in the picture.  Of course, it also happens over time.  Love is time and timelessness. 

Time is largely about counting.  I can count the time I’ve been in New York.  One year and ten months.  I can count the months I’ve been at the new job that I told myself would only be temporary.  Two months—and that already feels too long.  I can count the time since I last saw my family.  One year.  And then there are other things that I have lost count of.  Dates, days, kisses, small gestures…  Time is about counting.  It’s also about what counts.  Months can go by and yet they only really count in terms of the slow progression of life on a calendar.  And then there are other months, days, minutes, seconds, that feel like they make it all count.  

Recently, I find myself feeling timeless—ageless.  Entirely grown up with a job and a graduate degree and bills and business suits.  And also eternally youthful—screaming on carnival rides and eating candy and laughing and forgetting I have any responsibilities other than my own happiness.  A year ago, when I was writing about love—or time—I felt old and aging.  I felt like time was stretching across my face and the relationship I was in, leaving everything wrinkled and worse for wear.  And I thought life would be like that, slow and disappointing, forever and ever until it was just over. 

I don’t feel that way anymore.  I feel renewed and hopeful and I feel like that counts for something.  And maybe none of this is any sort of great revelation or insight into the human condition, but I am at work with four hours left in the workday and this is my way of killing time—or, maybe, making it count.