“Let’s say we’re here.” She put her fingernail on one diamond chip. “And we figure out a way to jump all the way back to here.” She pointed to another one, a few chips away.
I’ve been down in the dumps the past month. The proverbial pig-on-a-mattress-by-a-dumpster down in the dumps. It feels like the world as we know it is slowly (rapidly) falling apart and no one really realises it. People only started to get upset when the National Park Service was cut down because it would interfere with their recreational fishing. Less and less people seem to believe Jesus died for all, and whatever tenuous cynical grasp I had of my American future has evaporated. This diamond chip sucks.
“It wouldn’t matter where we came from. If we’re on that chip, we’re at that moment. It doesn’t matter whether we came from the chip behind it, or ten chips ahead of it. If we’re there, we’re there. Get it?”
Being consumed by anger and sadness has been easy, but pulling myself out of the muck every now and then has felt impossible. But sometimes there are little radiant diamond chips that pop up and give something to hold onto in the void. The chip of afternoons spent with friends. The chip of Andrew finally, blessedly securing a post-PhD job in the singularly worst job market in living memory. The chip of lunch with coworkers and hearing crazy stories. The chip of taking up sourdough again and naming my new starter “Frasier Grain’s Day Off.”
“So you’re saying this diamond chip is just sitting there minding its own business, and then suddenly a bunch of kids land in the diamond chip’s broccoli patch—”
Aside from the general muck of current American existence, there’s a special existential angst when you live in a brain meant for pursuing beautiful and intellectual things—all those journal articles I’ve bookmarked, the lino-cutting supplies I purchased, the walks outside I want to take—but feeling unable to. There’s a guilt in wanting to settle down for an afternoon with a good book when it feels like you should be educating and sharing and boycotting and allying. I think my brain panics and freezes between political fighting and ephemeral flighting.
Marcus’s face lit up. “Stop—I see your problem! You’re thinking that time exists on the diamonds themselves. It doesn’t. Each moment—each diamond—is like a snapshot.”
“A snapshot of what?”
“Of everything, everywhere! There’s no time in a picture, right? It’s the jumping, from one diamond to the next, that we call time, but like I said, time doesn’t really exist. Like that girl just said, a diamond is a moment, and all the diamonds on the ring are happening at the same time. It’s like having a drawer full of pictures.”
But one diamond chip—one picture in my sparse drawer—that has helped me turn my posture was getting to hear live, classical-ish music for the first time in a long time. It’s so purposeless, in a way—no galvanizing lyrics or causes supported or friends made when you’re sitting in an auditorium surrounded by an eclectic mixture of old people and families filled with younger siblings who’ve been dragged out to support their older siblings. But it’s still beautiful and joyful and renewing to bask in fine art for no purpose whatsoever. Getting to see Time for Three perform was a diamond chip I needed, and I carry it with me still.
“On the ring,” I said.
“Yes! All the diamonds exist at once!” He looked triumphant. “So if you jump backward, you are at that moment—you are in that picture—and you always were there, you always will be there, even if you don’t know it yet.”
— When You Reach Me, Rebecca Stead
Here’s a diamond chip when you need one:
