Junk Drawer

I’m standing still inside a shuffling train tossing a ball up and catching it. Simultaneously, I’m floating outside the train watching me lob the ball up and down. Phone poles pass by and I seem to throw the ball up before passing each pole and catch it after passing each pole. The train speeds up and the phone poles pass more quickly, yet I am still throwing the ball up and down at the same pace but the ball is still going up before passing each pole and coming down after passing each pole. The train keeps accelerating, and I continue floating next to the train watching me throw the ball up and down at the same pace and watching the same rhythm of the ball going up before passing the pole and coming down after each pole.

I burst through the curtains of my eyelids and watch as a sun in the cinders beyond shifting poles transforms into a sodium vapor street light shining through slots in the blinds. Slowly, the disorienting eddies of being one person while being two are forgotten. And slowly, I peel away the capsule of sweat-soaked sheets.

My feet touch the floor and I stand out of bed. I wipe off some slime from the fever dream. The rest evaporates. A cold that drove me early to bed the night before has passed. I pick my phone up from the bedside table to see that it's a couple hours earlier than I should have awoken. I also notice the battery is on the verge of dying. The steps echo through the house I grew up in as my bare feet slap against the tile on my way to find a charging cable in the kitchen junk drawer. 

As I walk down the hallway, I remember for some reason a discussion between my parents where one said that life only seems to go faster as you age as a consequence of knowing the sequence of the next day after living through so many similar ones. But maybe it's not a perception. Maybe time is accelerating for everyone. At a past point in my parents’ lives was time slower and is now faster and will grow faster yet when I’m my parents’ age? With more frequent changes, will I grow more nostalgic and disoriented than my parents?

In the drawer, I find a globular, tangled mess. Some of it is familiar to me from years and years ago. Some is newer, a few recent additions. In my quest for a phone cord, I poke around in this time capsule. I shove the items to one side of the drawer, then to the other. I separate the pile into two, then three piles, then clump them back together into one.  

Amidst the detritus, I find a black cord with rounded ends that charged a digital camera my parents used to record the infant and toddler years of my life. This camera was an odd placeholder in the transition from film to pixels. Film was a medium around long enough to capture John Quincy Adam’s likeness only to be replaced at its height of clarity and vividness by a technology, memory card cameras, destined to be outdated almost before its invention. But the technology wasn’t replaced before it captured me in transition, if transition can be defined as a series of firsts and lasts during a phase where, although true for everyone always, it was never more true that I was the oldest I had ever been yet the youngest I would ever be. Some moments would be forever unseen due to such rapid replacement by ever more technologically advanced cameras that the various drives or cards or discs could not be kept track of.

I pass over a white cord resembling a hammerhead worm that powered a plastic brick whose only purpose was to play my mom’s mp3’s. My mom told me the player could hold a thousand songs, which led me to ask why she only had three hundred and fifty. She said it took her whole life to listen to those songs since the six radio stations she grew up with just played the same songs over and over again.  

I also find the cord that connected the player to the speaker that she and my dad listened to in the house. I remember my dad telling a story about how I would get confused by listening to the radio in the car, which played songs other people wanted to listen to, and music in the house, which was music we wanted to hear. From my car seat, I would always ask the radio to play my favorite song. The point my dad belabored was that, sometimes, the radio played a song you never knew you were waiting for. A song you were forever craving or one that surprised you was more satisfying than one you could select at any time. These days, he would say, there were no rare songs.

Finally, I uncover a few phone cords. It seems not that long ago, one charging cord would power several generations of phones. Throw one away and several must emerge to take its place. Carrying two phones now requires a power cord hydra.

A vacuum forms in my chest when I look at the home screen, which illuminates once I plug the phone in. It shows a picture I stopped to take of a framed photo hanging in the hallway when I was last in this house four years ago. 

The picture reminds me that time is constant; like how sunlight always travels for eight minutes before it gives a group of kids that squinty-eyed goofy smile while looking into a camera. But then it makes me think that time is fluid since I’m looking at a digital image captured by an obsolete five year old phone of a grainy photograph snapped by a fifty year old camera bequeathed to a son.

I focus on the ball going up and down and life proceeds at a constant pace. But I look out the window and it's all rushing by faster and faster. Does that make any sense? I don’t know. I just know my phone’s battery drains quicker than it used to.