DOES anyone else have this fear of time? Not time, specifically, but time passing. It’s just there, constantly, bubbling under. Sometimes it scratches with red claws.
I turned to my friend during the rolling credits of a film recently. “I’m a 30-something woman.” It just popped out, apropos of nothing. “Is that bothering you?” he asked.
It’s bothering me. We only get one chance at it – one – and this is it, slipping by simultaneously poignant and pointless. It’s enough to give me palpitations.
Despite the fear, I have been living with one hand on the brake, not quite making the most of it. There’s a raft of ambitions and I am a 30-something woman who has done nothing about achieving them.
That’s not actually true. I haven’t even got as far as plotting a list of ambitions, that’s how in denial I am about the time passing. There is, however, one ambition. Or there was, dear reader, for I have achieved it.
I had a childhood without traditional anchors – no childhood home, no single school. Instead, I went for a string of consecutive and overlapping obsessions, held furtively. The first of these was The Mysterious Cities of Gold. I remember making my mum leave the cinema before the end of a film so we could be home in time to catch it on the ABC channel.
When we emigrated to Scotland no one at school had heard of the cartoon but the romance and adventure of Peru and its hidden cities of gold stayed with me.
My childhood ambition, then, was to visit Machu Picchu but I never did it. Every year, some excuse. Not enough annual leave left, not enough money, what if it’s a let down, it’s just fancy bricks.
“Procrastination,” Miss Herd, my Higher maths teacher, used to tell us, “is the thief of time.” With a terror of time, how foolish to be in cahoots with the thief of it.
At last, then, the trip to Peru was booked. The dates and locations plotted. The Machu Picchu tickets bought.
Several friends asked if I have a terminal illness. If there’s one thing to spur you on, it’s finding out you are so predictable that any deviation hints at personal catastrophe.
When you wait 25 years to see something, the anticipation is a part of childhood you’ve brought with you to adulthood. “Why is my needle stuck in childhood?” Maurice Sendak asked. “I don’t know … I guess that’s where my heart is.”
The Inca citadel sits at nearly 8000ft. What a long way up for a let down; it’s a risk, ticking off a childhood ambition.
First, in a museum in Cusco we saw knotted cords known as quipu, which were used by the Incas to keep track of historical and accounting records. In an overwhelming flashback I suddenly remembered that I would make quipu from my mother’s discarded knitting wool. What a weird child.
Up the mountain and there it was, Machu Picchu and my youth.
How do you describe the first sight of these stones, this monument whose image is so familiar?
My take: it is a big-bricked, llama-loved, piquant, dazzling grey, life after extinction feast. It is a monument to gods yet a monument to science. The Incas polished those bricks so they fit together beautifully, they fit together without adhesive. The bricks stay with nothing to force them. After staring for a long time you wonder if there are gods after all.
It wasn’t a holiday, it was an exercise in time travel. It was an acknowledgement of time’s inescapable passing. It might be time to get over the time thing.
Back at work and my body’s back in adulthood. My heart, though, is somewhere else.
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