Time: The indefinite continued progress of existence and events in the past, present and future regarded as whole. 

Nostalgia: A sentimental longing or wistful affection for the past, typically for a person or a place with happy associations. 

You could say I have a thing for Time, but I don’t dabble in Nostalgia. I prefer to grow from my past, not yearn for it. Forward is the pace. Be the change and all that. Anyway. Time is wild and the standards for measuring it are bizarre. Like tossing a rope on a wild stallion and calling it broken. There! We’ve wrangled Time. Clocks and calendars y’all, clocks and calendars.

Obviously I’m fascinated by both. I asked for a wristwatch before I could tell time, one with hands so I could marvel as they waved. I used to make my own monthly calendar in between the pages of my journals, which were just school notebooks plastered with magazine clippings and stickers. My mom still sends us kids a wall calendar every December. And I still send Tessa a collection of empty calendar boxes paired with those quotes everyone loves to hate but I adore, that are maybe like, too literal for each month of 2026. Pen to paper helps both of us keep track of our brains in a visual, easy-to-reference format, and you know I love a historical library document. I keep a dry erase calendar in the kitchen and I look at it often. Time is an elusive beast, an escape artist, and so very easy to steal. 

And the clocks. I don’t know when it started, but it’s possible I have too many. They’re scattered all over the house. Some gifted, some thrifted, some still tick-tocking away, others paused forever at 11:11 or 3:33 or some witchy little mix of digits. I just rescued an old radio alarm clock from Goodwill, the brown one that buzzes with bright red digital numbers. Pretty sure everyone had this clock, just a few to choose from in the 80s, not the 65,474,833,399 on the market today (WHERE DOES ALL THIS SHIT GO??). You know, the GE one where if you accidentally press the hour button it just advances the time, so you gotta be real intentional about pushing the right bump when your hand is anywhere near the controls, because otherwise you mess with Time and then you have to click through the whole cycle to get back to Now. Turns out, time really IS a flat circle.

The day after my two dollar purchase happened to be daylight savings (whatever that means). As I spent way too long questioning myself on what time I needed to set the alarm to make it to spin class in the morning, I was distracted by how sad it is our phones do all the work for us now, we barely even have to think. People don’t have to figure anything out anymore! Existence is the biggest puzzle it’s ever been and everyone’s checked out, blindly drowning in our own chosen abyss, controlled by dings and beeps like Pavlov’s dogs.

“…with multiple human rights abuses committed by the US-backed military government.” So I guess the world has always been a dumpster fire, and I’m just now realizing. Kind of an embarrassing discovery.

Anyway, I’m in the middle of a weird one-sided break up with my phone. I keep telling it how trapped I feel, how much better I’ll be without it. It keeps reminding me how interwoven it is with today’s world, how impossible life will be without it, but I don’t care, I’m headed for the 90s, living in the Wild, Wild West. You won’t regret watching that.

I have a box I call the Hands of Time, which just contains some hands that fell off of a clock in The Museum. I have clocks that play sound, clocks that used to spin, clocks with domes, clocks with missing numbers. Wooden clocks, metal clocks, clocks made of gears, mirror clocks. Clocks that spell out the time with words. I have a hand etched lunar clock, keeps with the cycles of the moon in the shape of an owl, of course it’s on the Bird Wall. Right next to my most cherished keeper of time, Grandma’s cuckoo clock. Something about manually raising those heavy pinecones twice a day really helps put a finger on Time. I won’t share how often I’ve stood on Fred’s chair waiting to greet the little bird that pops out. OoOoo a portal.

It was given to me years ago in a slightly broken state and lived quietly in my basement for years before I was inspired to get it fixed. I walked into the Willy Street clock shop just before noon, and as the door closed behind me, 100+ clocks chimed off unison. Who knows, maybe that’s when I jumped timelines. Cuz guys, something weird is going on. 

Two-ish years ago my friend Lindsey Marco Polo’d me about this movie she was about to watch called Leave the World Behind, maybe you’ve heard of it. She explained the plot a bit to which I responded with something like hmm, I think I’ve seen that, and she was like, really it was just released like yesterday. Curiosity perked, I declared I too would watch it, together but separate.

Enter Sandman.

YOU GUYS. I knew how the movie would end the moment it began. I knew the entire plot before it unfolded. I knew the exact order of the random array of horrors, save some scenes not included in the first version. The original was actually quite good, no name actors, storylines more convincing, more developed; this one felt thrown together, like a half ass attempt at telling the same story with some big names to smooth over the lack of depth: Julia Roberts, Ethan Hawk, Mahershala Ali, Kevin Bacon. Of course, six degrees of separation Kevin Bacon. I think about the premise of Footloose a lot these days.

I spent the entire 140 minutes dazed and confused. Aside from a few notable differences, the plot was exactly the same. The dialogue was the same. But the same as what? I could not remember the name of the first version I saw, when I saw it, or how, only that I definitely saw it. I combed through my streaming history on every platform, searching for the “original.” Nope, nada. Mmmmkaaay. I Marco’d Lindsey the strange reality of my situation before reluctantly turning to the Internet. No trace of a remake, no confirmation of anything other than being a based off a book written in 2020 and I hadn’t read a book outside of book club for years.

And then I found this Reddit thread.

^Jackpot.

_*Same*

Not sure why the fact somebody’s mom on the internet who also shared my experience made me feel better. Instead of focusing on the fucked up fact that the dozen other posters on the Reddit thread who saw my version also couldn’t remember the name of the movie or which streaming service they saw it on or precisely when, but were able to list out the exact differences between the two that I had also noted, I took comfort in the fact I wasn’t alone. Like throwing a rope on a wild stallion. See? This guy’s mom saw what I saw. I’m not making it up, I’m not crazy. Case closed.

I reported back to Lindsey, told Alex about it at brunch the next day and promptly let the incident float back into the ethos, forgetting about it almost entirely until the Mandela Effect stumbled across my carefully curated feed on the internet a few weeks ago. I have a strict 420 rule on Instagram. That’s how many accounts I can follow. And they’re basically all musicians, nature and independent journalism.

Mandela Effect: The Mandela Effect is a phenomenon where large groups of people collectively share the same false memory of a past event, cultural detail, or image. Coined by paranormal researcher Fiona Broome in 2009 regarding Nelson Mandela’s death, it highlights how false memories are consistent across many people. Key examples include the Berenstain Bears (misremembered as “stein”), the Fruit of the Loom logo cornucopia, and Darth Vader saying “Luke, I am your father”.

For the record, I learned about Nelson Mandela as a historical figure in the 90s. When I heard he died, my first thought was, isn’t he already dead? The Fruit of the Loom logo definitely had a cornucopia in my days working softlines at Target. I’ve never seen Star Wars, but that didn’t stop LUUUUUKE, I AM YOUR FATHER, from worming its way into my ears. Could go either way on those bears.

_{Time is an allusion.}

But hey, I’m with you. If I heard someone explain what I just did about seeing a different version of Netflix movie that’s been totally scraped from the internet, I’d think to myself, whelp, there must be a logical explanation, one that doesn’t involve time loops and multiple dimensions and alternate realities. One that doesn’t imply we’re living in a simulation.

But it happened TO me, so I don’t have that luxury. I’m rolling in the deep now. We’ve always been inside the Matrix. Time is a flat circle. Our children are educated by books published by Ghislane Maxwell’s dad, Little Saint James is shaped like the Nickelodeon Splat, Buzz Aldrin wasn’t joking when he started casually mentioning we never landed on the moon, we should question 9/11 more than we remember it, they’re monitoring everything, freewill isn’t what you think it is and I joked about being a witch until I became an actual witch.

I went back to check on that Reddit thread recently, which is how I learned Michelle and Barak Obama were co-producers on the movie. Everything feels intentional these days. But why. To what end?

Anyway. What happened, happened, I saw what I saw, that’s about all. You’re free to do what do choose with this information. I’m not trying to convince anybody of anything. I’m just a little bird.

What does that make you?

Ca-caw.

^{OoOooOooOoooooOoooO}

More Reddit Thread screenshots in case you’re not a clicker: