Lost Space-Time

John Hanson’s most prized daily experience was discovering a secret pocket of space-time, which to him meant moments when he was doing something boring and then felt inspired to stop and sit down in the corner of the room or at a table in the mall and scribble some ideas on a napkin, or even just stare out and see the world as though for the first time. The ideas were usually bad ideas, and he usually thought more about himself than he did about the things he was looking at, but that didn’t matter. Space-time made John’s daily existence into a field of endless possibilities, a mine field of alternate lives. The idea of a negative version of space-time, however, began to develop in John’s mind, like an evil twin that wants to destroy everything beautiful. John called this, rather imaginatively, LOST SPACE-TIME. Lost space-time was the sudden experience of panic that he was supposed to be somewhere else doing something else, and that he was already very late. During moments of lost space-time John heard people shouting at him, like the voices of his old schoolteachers. But what made lost space-time especially frustrating was that John could never remember what it was he was supposed to do. Naturally, the two ideas began to merge. John began developing the terror, mostly when he was trying to get to sleep, that whenever he would discover a new pocket of space-time that it would also bring with it a simultaneous feeling of lost space-time, as if the moment a pocket of space-time would open up it would open up into the void of loss and an impossible missed obligation. Part of this merging was the way John named it. Had John called lost space-time anything else it might not have invaded on his space-time. John found the only way to combat this dilemma was to long for lost space-time, to make appointments and obligations and not record them, so that his day would be filled with fear of missing appointments. John hoped that lost space-time would open up a new pocket of space-time. In those days John Hanson wasn’t working.