ad infinitum
today has been a day about time. three years since i got my car serviced (since i moved in with my partner), five days since i felt sick, eleven days since my last injection. two days until i get paid again, twelve weeks of training i get to do for work, three months until this project runs out of money for real and we need to figure out what we're doing next. maybe, three months until we need to start looking for Normal Person Work after this brief interlude, this dream that was meant to be six months and just kept getting longer. or maybe - hopefully - three months until we learn that there is some way to keep dreaming for a while longer.
the last two and a half years haven't been a momentary slumber though. they've been my life, they have fundamentally changed who i am as a person, they have been so full of joy and wonder and they have brought so many people into my life who are filled with the same. if this has been a dream, it isn't one that i am going to wake up and forget.
when i look at the future, though, i can't picture any world where waking up is some permanent, binding choice. decades are made of years are made of seasons and months and weeks and days; the thought of setting out on that journey and burning my life away at work one week at a time used to terrify me, but now i know it won't be that way. for a while, maybe, but each week is a different one, and i can't imagine a future where one of them doesn't eventually pull me back into doing what i love.
infinity is a difficult concept; you can't really do normal maths on it, it doesn't respect most intuition about how numbers should behave because it isn't one. you can approach it, you can look at what's there, but you can't touch it.
as a function approaches infinity1 its value tends to do one of three things. if any unbalanced terms are increasing in value (for which "increasing" means moving away from zero in any direction), they will continue, and the function will likely approach infinity2 according to its most powerful component. if none are increasing, and all terms are decreasing (or constant), they will endlessly approach zero, and the function will approach a stable value, though it will usually never reach it perfectly. if neither of these are true - for example, if the function contains periodic components like sine that are not otherwise removed - the function will never approach any stable value, infinite or otherwise.
late last year i read stone butch blues by Leslie Feinberg, a semi-autobiographical book about a transmasculine3 4 butch lesbian in late 20th century new york. it was a powerful insight into a part of my(?) cultural history that i hadn't really gotten that close to before, and it broke my heart over and over. Jess' story is told in a straightforward and simple manner, the way lives themselves are told; one event after the other, days leading into weeks leading into years leading into a lifetime, until something happens to tear it all down, over and over again.
as the book went on i found myself hoping that surely this was it, surely this was the happy ending this poor person deserved after all of her hardship, only to realise with dread that no, my kindle said the book still had 30% to go, this moment couldn't last. and it didn't. there was still 24%, 17%, 12%, and nothing was safe. but then there was 7%, then 4, then 1; at some point, the book ended, not with a big finale but with a new sunrise, and with hope for the future.
at the end of march i wanted to scream defiance at the writing of the world that threatened to wrap up a neat little bundle of plot threads that i wanted to keep following. i knew i was being stupid at the time and it's even more obvious in hindsight. this isn't an ending or a season finale; life doesn't have those, it has days leading into weeks into months into years. it has time.
every state my life has managed to keep for a while felt permanent while it was around, until something happened to change it. objects in motion will stay in motion unless acted upon, and probably eventually something will act upon this object, but for the moment the trajectory looks good to me. as days become weeks become months, we will continue to grow and learn and do better; things may feel chaotic now, but all of these perturbations will decay to zero in the face of time marching onwards, one day at a time.
there are plenty of things i want in life at some point, but right now i'm content where i am. so camp out the night with your candles if you need to, keep swinging around on your comet orbit, and dance among the stars when you can; this moment will still be here for you when the sun comes up. as weeks become months become years, we can stick around here, we can keep this moment for a while, if you want it. you have time. we have time. we'll get it all right eventually.
or negative infinity, for completeness↩
or negative infinity↩
while i don't recall that Jess ever describes herself as trans in the book, i don't believe that Feinberg would object to this descriptor for his4 stand-in character↩
as mentioned in an interview in 2006, Feinberg considered he/him to be "honoring [his] gender expression" in an all-trans setting where doing so would not diminish or hide his transness; surely the blog of a trans woman counts in this case↩