Long Exposure
The building smells like the bottom of a murky pond. A special prescription has obliged me to visit an old-school compound pharmacy, where they mix ointments and medications by hand—a stark contrast to the mass-produced products I’m used to buying. In addition to the elevated work bench behind the counter where pharmacists toil over their potions, there is a soda counter, closer to the windows facing the main drag, and a few dilapidated rows of yellowing shelves where more mundane products, like aspirin, sit within easy reach.
Teenagers drift in and out, congregating on the worn, spinning stools of the soda counter. Clusters of signs advertise milkshakes and free Wi-Fi. The old-pond smell, combined with sepia-toned photos of the original owners on the walls, ancient shelving, worn surfaces, and a curio cabinet populated by antique medicine bottles—including a yellowing wrapper for “cocaine toothache drops”—make me feel like my great-grandmother is just out of sight, peering at me from the past.
Sometimes I wonder how it would be if you could turn time on its edge and see it from the outside, the shape of things coming into view as they really are, in their four or more dimensions. The closest I can come is a bowling ball’s weight distorting a sheet of rubber, an analogy for the way gravity bends three-dimensional space, creating a well that lighter objects fall into and which diverts heavier objects from their previous paths.
What would we see, then, if we could see time as well as space? Would the three dimensions of our bodies bloat outward through all the places we’ve occupied as time elapsed, our comings and goings, journeys and meanderings, all cloaked in the veil of our flesh? Would we thin out, our substance becoming gossamer, indistinct as objects in motion in long-exposure photographs? Would we quickly blot out all the slower-moving objects with our own relentless, shifting, streaking shadows?
Perhaps our messy magnitude would be like the depths of the ocean, or the bottom of that murky pond—silt and detritus from all our doings massing and darkening, creating a residue that persists long after every soft thing has disintegrated, shrouding the skeletal remains of all sterner objects, until you’d never know there was anything there at all.
