Sometime during the third week of July, the clocks slowed down. I consider this a personal favor and can even say by what simple methodology I was able to influence their slowing: if I can help it, I make sure to catch trains and flights by only the thinnest margins.
“The gods are bored,” I joked with my brother Liviu. He agreed, “If we provide entertainment, they might make allowances.” But it was my other brother Rares who taught me the trick when we were kids. No matter where his origin and destination in a room with a table in it, he would take the long way around the table, and this, he said, would buy him luck. I think about him trailing his hand along the perimeter of the table top — it’s like letting a horse know where you are when it can’t see you, by brushing your hand across its rump. Trust is a bridge from you to something else (not just the table or the horse).
Three weeks ago I looked up the schedule for the wrong station, Brewster instead of Southeast to Grand Central, and by the time that Alexandra and I arrived on the platform, it had been a good 10 minutes since the train had come and gone. The heat was stupefying. One of the station workers offered us bottles of water from an ice cooler, a small kindness that I filed under other justifications for missing the train. I didn’t tell Alexandra, or Liviu, who was driving us, that I’d looked up the wrong station. Absent-mindedness is arguably less amusing. It’s a fine line.
What really makes the peanut gallery go wild
is the gauntlet of emotions that we construct then set about trying to conquer: anxiety, optimism, self-loathing, resignation. We are forever accounting for our underestimations.
In any event, I’d banked enough near-misses by the time Gabe arrived that there were visible signs of dilation by the end of the week. In general, we did more things; increasingly, more things just seemed to fit into the day. The first real sign occurred while sitting at the Frying Pan — to which we’d biked from Park Slope, from which we biked to Greenpoint — when Gabe reached over and pulled a perfect silver hair out of my head, one that I am sure wasn’t there just a few days before. That’s not a contradiction. When the clocks slow down, it isn’t that you age more slowly; there is just more time surrounding you, like a greater depth of field in front and behind your shifting moments of sharpness. 
But if all of our movements stretched along proportionately with the surrounding fabric, what would be the point of slowing down at all? The payoff from boarding trains as the doors are closing is that all of the time you didn’t spend waiting patiently on platforms gets cached somewhere else, like rollover minutes. The gods supply the little bit of magic dust required to pry you temporarily from the fabric, so that you can actually feel its expansion around you.
I was in love with a boy the summer I turned 20, and I swear it seemed as if physical walls were shaking loose from physical laws, and the rooms I entered that also held this boy were breathing and billowing like blown sails, and the light that flooded these rooms passed through gold or honey first. I remembered my dreams without trying and marveled at the conviction that June and August were racing away from each other and the whole apparently irreversible sequence of events was falling into the middle of July. You can ripen and rot in a space like that.
The grey hair was just a sign. I didn’t feel the slowness until the last day, when we were biking back from Coney Island along the Narrows. There’s something odd about that bike path anyway. You can’t exactly say that it’s a beautiful ride, flanked as it is by the Belt Parkway and container ships. It’s not a very human space. But you approach the bridge for so long, constantly readjusting your perception of its scale, the way you do approaching a mountain; you know your eyes are deceiving you. It’s bigger than you think. It’s huge.
There is a point when you stop approaching — you stand beneath the Verrazano-Narrows, racking focus through the air above you, and for a second you are fixed inside the center-most moment of July, with June and August about as far away from each other as they get. And from that point you’re leaving.
(Photograph of the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge by Gabriel Patay)
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