Sunday Journal Prompt

“The past is never dead. It's not even past.” 

– William Faulkner 

I spent a recent weekend in New Orleans, enjoying time with my brother and his family and seeing his daughters perform in a play. A friend drove me by a duplex apartment where I lived for a year during my college days nearly thirty years ago. 

A rush of not just memories but voices returned—those of my two roommates on the first floor and those of the three boys who lived upstairs, mostly voices I hadn’t heard in decades. With this oddly present echo from the past, Faulkner’s quote about the past never dying resonated.

Lately I’ve been obsessed with time-travel narratives—such as Netflix’s Dark and Octavia Butler’s Kindred—and have been thinking about how time, which I often think of as a constant, seems to speed up or slow down. “Time is an illusion,” according to Albert Einstein, which makes me wonder if our perception of time may differ from reality. 

What does the concept of time mean to you? Have you ever thought of it differently?