The difference time makes

My best friend lives in Australia. This mattered today, a lot, because I was utterly miserable and wanted to confide in him. We chatted on Facebook for half an hour or so, but he had to go out, or go to bed, or whatever it is that people who live on the other side of the world do on a Saturday evening, and so we went our separate ways.

Many South Africans must know this, how time differences divide us from those we love, and increase our sense of isolation.

When I lived in Sydney, what tormented me most was time. Specifically, the hours that separated me from my family and most of my friends. Eight or nine hours is huge when every moment feels like a vast plain that stretches into nothingness in every direction. When the loneliness was so bad it was physically painful, it was time, not distance, that haunted me. When I woke up, family and friends were going to sleep; my afternoon was almost over by the time they woke up and when it was bedtime for me, they were still at work.

I was living in their tomorrow, they in my yesterday.

So I felt fundamentally disconnected from them. Psychologically, there is something deeply reassuring about the conviction that others are going about the same routines as us, at the same time; that they are eating breakfast, sitting in traffic, walking into the office, having lunch. We may cast aspersions on the quotidian sameness of our lives, but it is that sense of unspoken, shared ritual, that shared experience of time, that bonds us to others.

Zombieland, which I loved, imagines an America without people. “Without people, we might as well be zombies,” says the film’s narrator. I felt like a zombie when I lived in Australia and there are times, like now, when I feel like one again.