Potheads Don’t Believe in Time

I
I’m in a dorm room. Or a car. Or a basement where the only
source of light is a shitty lava lamp that someone’s older brother
left behind when they left for college. I forget who,
but someone exhales, stares at the ceiling, and says:
“Dude, time isn’t real.” And, for a brief moment, it
makes perfect sense—maybe because I just took a hit and
maybe because 1995 feels both like five minutes ago and
a past life you or I barely remember living.

But it’s also still 1991.
But also 1977 was yesterday.
Somewhere, right now, it’s 1989.
Somewhere, my 6-year old self is watching The Jetsons,
and believing in the year 2000.

I don’t know it yet, but five years from now, I’ll be standing
in a different basement, different smoke curling in the air.
Someone will pass me a joint, and I’ll take a hit without
thinking, the way people say “yeah sure” when they aren’t
listening. And then—
mid-inhale,
I’ll remember this exact night.
This, now.
And it’ll be like stepping into my own ghost.
I’ll sit back, stare at the ceiling,
exhale slow,
and think—
“shit, I’ve been here before.”
It doesn’t happen all at once.
It hits in pieces.

One second, you’re in a basement, sitting on an old couch that
smells like someone else’s cigarettes, listening to a CD that
someone burned on a computer the size of a microwave.
The next second—
you’re not.

You’re still here, in the basement,
on the couch that’s too broken to be comfortable,
wearing a hoodie that smells like bonfire smoke.

But you’re also somewhere else,
Maybe a year ahead.
Maybe five.
Maybe you’re in a different room,
older, heavier in ways you don’t have words for yet,
listening to a song that hasn’t been written,
yet somehow
still reminds you of right now.

Or maybe you’re looking back at this moment from some impossible
future—thirty, forty, older than you ever imagined being. And it
hits you—this is already a rerun. This exact night. This exact
conversation. It’s already happened. It’s already happening. It will
keep happening.

II
They say memory is linear. A straight shot. A clean progression.
They said you would collect moments like souvenirs, arrange them
neatly on a shelf,
and leave the past behind like a town you’ve outgrown.

Bullshit.

Memory is a scratched CD skipping backward, repeating
the same four seconds of a song
until you forget what comes next.
Memory is flipping through TV channels at 2am,
half-asleep,
catching a scene from a movie you swear you’ve seen before—
you don’t remember when,
maybe you dreamed it,
maybe the dream was real
maybe this is just a bad copy.

III
Before, time had structure. It built on itself. Accumulated. The 70s
led into the 80s, the 80s into the 90s, and you could feel it—
time passing, the past growing distant, slipping into memory like an
old photograph losing its color.

Then the internet happened. And time stopped behaving.
The past wasn’t behind you anymore. It was available, on
demand. Indexed. Searchable.
—That song you haven’t heard since high school? It still exists
exactly as it did then. Same sound. Same recording. Same
three-and-a-half minutes, trapped in place.
—That berries and cream commercial from 2007? Someone
uploaded it to Youtube in 2008. And again in 2021. And
once more last week.
—That argument you had in 2009? The texts are still here.
Scroll up. It never ended.

Before, the past was something you had to remember. Now
it’s something you can replay at will.

And maybe that’s why time feels broken. Because we don’t
experience it, we revisit it. We don’t move forward, we just
loop back. The past doesn’t drag behind us, it lingers, waiting
to be called up like an old webpage you never really closed.

Time used to be something you felt—long summers, slow winters,
the stretch between birthdays. Now it’s something you scroll.
Nothing is gone long enough to be forgotten. Nothing stays buried.
Maybe that’s why time doesn’t feel real. Because it isn’t moving.

It’s just refreshing.

IV
I take a hit, let it settle in, thick and slow,
the way a song lingers in my head long after the radio’s shut off.
The lava lamp oozes in the corner, a deep-space alien jellyfish
pulsing in red and gold,
and the room is exactly how it’s always been—
low light, half-empty beer cans on the floor,
the clickety-clack of someone changing the CD.

Someone exhales,
eyes half-lidded.
“Man, what time is it?”
I glance at the clock
but the numbers don’t mean anything.

Late. Early. Forever.

I can feel it now, in the way the room folds in on itself, in the
way the conversation we’re having has already happened
(and will happen again),
in the way I can’t tell if it’s been five minutes or five hours
since someone last spoke.

Because time doesn’t move forward. It pools. It drifts.

It’s this basement, but also every basement.
— I’m here, slouched on Jessie’s couch, Birks off, drumming “Two Step”
with my fingers on my thigh.
— I’m my rollerblading from home from the Mall, the fresh-cut country club
grass scent wafts by me, a new CD in my Discman, with
that song I need to play one more time.
— I’m 16, sitting on the hood of someone’s car, cheap beer
sweating in my grip, the static of the radio blending
into the sound of cicadas.
— I’m 17, on the floor of my bedroom, phone cord wrapped
around my fingers, the soft murmur of some girl’s voice
on the other end of the line, saying “Are you still there?”

I’m all of them at once.
Because time doesn’t disappear. It stacks. It loops.
It clings to places, to songs,
to the way light slants
through a window at the right hour.
It’s why a song can drop me
straight into a moment
I haven’t thought about
in years.
It’s why I can smell asphalt
after the rain and suddenly
be 10 years old again,
walking around
with a crumpled
$5 bill in my pocket.
It’s why this night will never end.
Not really.

The song on the CD player skips,
someone shifts on the couch,
the lava lamp pulses,
slow and endless.

V
Someone’s talking but I can’t hold onto the words, they slip
between my fingers like light through the blinds, like radio
static at the edge of the dial, and I know I’m still here,
I’m still in this basement, I’m still in 1995, I’m still listening
to the same song I’ve been listening to for a thousand years—
But—

I’m also somewhere else.
Somewhen else.

I am watching myself from across the room, from across
a decade, from a place just outside of time where all versions
of me exist at once. I see myself as a kid, legs too long for
my body, pressing REC on my stereo because the song I
love is playing on the radio and I don’t want to lose it. I see
myself at 40, standing in a convenience store, buying a Reese’s
Nutrageous and wondering why the smell of hot asphalt
makes my chest ache. I see myself in some other timeline,
some other version of things where I said yes instead of no,
where I left instead of stayed, where everything is the same
except for one small thing, one tiny shift that changed everything.

And now I can’t shake it—
the feeling that I could step sideways, slip through,
drop into some other track where the past is still happening,
where the future has already burned itself out. Because if time
isn’t moving forward, if it’s just stacking, then maybe nothing
ever really ends. Maybe we are all just ghosts of ourselves,
playing out the same scenes, trapped in reruns of a life that doesn’t
even belong to us. And the thought hits so hard I have to close my eyes.

The room is spinning.
The lava lamp pulses.
The song ends
but it doesn’t end,
just starts over,
starts again,
the same chords,
the same words,
the same loop
repeating itself
forever
and ever and ever—
or maybe not.

Maybe time is a wheel, but I was never inside it.
Maybe I am just the shadow it casts as it turns.
Maybe every version of me is watching, waiting, wondering—

Maybe there was never a loop at all.
Maybe this moment is the first and only time it has ever happened.
Maybe time is a lie,
maybe I have never existed before this second
and I never will again.
Maybe the past isn’t waiting.
Maybe there is no past.
Maybe it was all just smoke.

Coda
The lava lamp thickens, slows. The song fades into the hiss of
the speakers, the quiet hum of something unseen. Someone shifts
on the couch and clears his throat. Someone says, “Shit,
what were we even talking about?” And I almost laugh, because
I don’t know either. Because maybe there was no conversation
at all, just a long unraveling thought, just a flicker of something
too big to hold. Because maybe it doesn’t matter. Maybe the thought
was never meant to be kept, just felt.

I sit up.
Rub my eyes.
The room is still here,
still solid.
But I don’t trust it
the same way I did before.

Somewhere outside, a car passes.
A dog barks.
The clock ticks in the kitchen
up the stairs, steady, oblivious.
Time moves like it always has.

Except I know better now.
Or maybe I don’t.

Maybe I’ll wake up tomorrow, shake my head, forget this feeling,
forget this moment, forget the shape of time folding over itself
like an old map pressed into too many creases. Maybe I’ll step
back into the illusion. Maybe that’s the only way to live.

Or maybe—
Maybe this night is still happening.
Maybe I never leave this basement.
Maybe I will always be here,
half-lit
by the glow of a dying lava lamp.
Maybe I’ll be here forever.

Maybe I already am.