Time works differently in Limbo. What were minutes now seem like days, while seconds turn into these dragged-out hours. Since you remain alone here you feel somewhat doomed to be immortal, infinite, Godlike. Pain is amplified tenfold, an endurance test, where as happiness passes you in this all out sprint. Everything around you simultaneously slows and quickens. Envision it like that scene in a comic-book film where the superhero runs at super-speed, the world suddenly growing dense around him. It’s like, this doesn’t make any sense, but it does. I understand it. I hate it. I mean I fucking hate it. Get on with the film and end this tacky green-screen leaf-blower ballet — But I understand it. It’ s almost as if time isn’t sure how to survive here. It too is trying to work out where it fits into the world, what it wants to be. It too seems entirely lost. 

In Limbo we gawk at time like we do the conveyor-belts of our airport terminals. We stare at it, transfixed by the circling current, waiting for our bags to show up, our permission to leave and move on with our life. But now, after graduation, in the lull just before total maturity, our bags begin to take ages to appear. And so we wait and wait and wait, and even though we’re pretty sure they’re not lost, there’s still some luggage left to go, some people still huddled around, we begin to stress a little bit. We think questions like, “Will we ever leave?” And “Is there something wrong with my bag?” Our minds fold in on themselves as time’s spinning flow makes us feel dizzy and sick. All rationality inside us atrophies, swiftly replaced by an internal panic, the kind that makes palms sweat and tongues coil. We fight the urge to ask for some help, for reassurance, for a stern voice to say “Everything will be ok,” because we know there’s no use in it, that we’re all totally alone in this. It’s every child for themselves. All we can do now is suffer attentively, keep our eyes fixed on the belt and wait for our bag, our turn, our chance, praying that we’ll be able to recognise it when it when we see it.

It’s just time. Time. Time. Time. All I do now is think about time, all the time. I sit and wonder about how much is left, where it will take me, what should I do with it, how can I make the most of it and avoid regretting the sum total I do end up using. I’ll be falling asleep and mourning the seconds as they float past. In Limbo I seem incapable of filling time with the right stuff. I’ve become really depressive in my outlook on time. I endlessly oscillate between wanting to try stuff out and worrying it’ll be a waste. What am I searching for? I’ve tried job, girlfriend, travel, meditation. I’ve tried caring and letting go and planning and accepting and it all leads to a load of blunt heartbroken nothingness. None of it makes me feel any better. It’s as if between manifesting and jinxing there’s no way to ever win. I have this voice inside my head trying to satisfy a formless longing with an external fact. Security only makes me feel trapped and bored where as chasing a dream only makes me feel lost and deluded. There’s this piece inside me that frustrates and fizzes around my bones all day and makes me grind my teeth back and forth and tap at my head repeatedly and pull on my hair and become paralysed with intense unknowing. And it’s getting worse. But this piece in me is not necessarily the main problem. The main problem is that I envision nothing will ever truly cure it. And this really scares me. The sinister stress over not knowing in which direction my life is headed has recently torn the neck right out of my back. My chin has been cocked leftward for the last few months. To move it even an inch now incites this kind of nerve-pinching agony. I’ve had to adopt the turn of Keaton’s batman where the head stays still while the torso pivots 360. This is the physical toll of Limbo on a human body. 

Time is no longer something that passes, it’s something that swallows, a swamp of seconds, a temporal quicksand set on suffocating me, and it all elapses to a point where I realise I’ve been doing absolutely nothing. I spend all day trying to focus on one singular task out of fear not getting anything done, but it doesn’t help. In Limbo I seem incapable of filling my time with actions my brain will deem progressive. 

As for the days it’s only a matter of light and dark. There is no sense of real progress here. Time has never felt more like the physicists describe it; a slow and invisible and oozing light. There is no morning, midday or afternoon anymore. There is only the yo-yo arc of the sun and moon over Dublin bay. There is no tomorrow. Outside of this moment there is only endless dribble. The idea of tomorrow seems irrelevant and nameless now. I’ve started to distrust numbers too. Remember, it’s all just the sun. This is time’s true face. A surrounding loop of waning light that lets me know when its socially expectable to drink a beer.