An excerpt from a memoir in progress:

Andy Schu
Andy Schu
Aug 28, 2017 · 7 min read

TIME

I am constantly trying to get my head to make sense of the objectivity of time. In theory it makes sense — the clock clicks at pre-measured equal intervals. But time doesn’t always move the same, does it? In the heart of a breakup time slugs for what seems like 5ever. And when we look back at the happier times of the relationship, it seems like it happened in high speed. I don’t care how quick the clock is moving when I can feel my organs pulsing against my ribcage in the midst of an anxiety attack, because while we can only perceive time as linear, we have to factor in personal experience.

Someone once mentioned to me that time can be more easily understood in terms of change. The more change we experience, the quicker time moves. It is the missing x in the equation. The less, the slower. This makes a lot of sense to me, I can recall many times when I became lost in someone’s presence and hours went by in what felt like minutes. In these times my mind slows, observes and processes details, savors the moments. I spent 5 minutes once studying the way a pretty girl blinked:

She smiled at me playfully. Her tan skin highlighted her eyelashes curled outward above her eye whites. The dark pupil centers were engulfed with a thick brown band the color of tree bark. The tiny strings of red vessels looked tired and worn, like she was finally defeated. When she blinked it was a ceremonious action, slow and thoughtful. It seemed as if she waited just until that moment when the cold air stung the exposed pupils, and her soft skin would release and fall, coating her eyes like a comforting quilt. There was something about this whole mechanism of hers — it was curious and longed to explore. I looked hard into her, and thought that maybe her eyes hadn’t admitted defeat, but only awaited to find what they had always been searching for.

Deepak Chopra and Menas Kafatos complicated my beliefs even further in their book “You are the Universe.” They ask, “If gravity as a force is mutable, what about other things we take for granted as fixed and reliable?” We don’t wake up each day wondering what the gravity level will be. Gravity, in my opinion, is the most constant thing in our lives, and even that changes drastically in the vaster universe. If gravity is a lot more complex than we (non-scientist types like me) can possibly comprehend, why is time any different? Are we taking time for granted as fixed and reliable when in fact, it is not?

There is this incredible 2009 movie called “Mr. Nobody” written and directed by Jaco Van Dormael. The main character, Nemo Nobody, is the last mortal man on earth. When an interviewer tries to tell his story, Nemo recounts not one life, but the infinite possibilities (well, ya know the movie can only be so long, not all of the possibilities) of his life. Each decision causes a different story. There are so many beautiful quotes from the screenplay, but one in particular emerges as a motif. “It’s forever. The smoke comes out of Daddy’s cigarette, but it never goes back in. We cannot go back. That’s why it’s hard to choose. You have to make the right choice. As long as you don’t choose, everything remains possible.

It’s Schrödinger’s cat, it’s choosing not to move to a new city because as long as you don’t, you always still can; it’s the story of the dog laying on the nail wailing in pain. ‘Why doesn’t he move?’ someone asks, ‘because it doesn’t hurt enough yet.’ says someone else. It’s the liminal space in our lives, the in-between, Dante’s limbo. This place is not unfamiliar to humans. It’s a place I often live, and maybe even would say I’m comfortable in.

I don’t know why I remember things in anecdotes and movie quotes. I suppose I’ve always been that way, though. It’s in stories and art that I can transcend time. They say you should never date a writer because then you can never die. I also had a writing teacher once address our fears of exposing family and friends’ flaws in our non-fiction writing.

“If they didn’t want you to write about it, they shouldn’t have done it.”

I think about this a lot and the immortality art gives us. The way I can tell you every horrifying moment in my life, and every wonderful one, too, and that means it will exist forever. The words can’t go back into my brain the way the smoke can’t go back in the cigarette. I wonder if my family and friends resent this piece of me. I wonder if many of the people I’ve written about even know that they are characters in a story, that I constructed and alternate parallel possible path. I wonder. I wonder.

I wonder if we can go back.

I wonder if we have more control than we think.

I imagine my life rewinding, stopping at the places I am curious. I close my eyes and I change the course. I choose to move to California after high school, attend community college to establish residency and end up at UCLA. I attend Bruin football games and I’m regularly a deep honey tan. I work as a production assistant for a few years, and move up the chain of command pretty quickly. Partly because I’m talented, partly because I’m stubborn. I write a screenplay in my very few sleep designated hours. I’m exhausted but it’s okay, because I’m inspired. I make the right connection, I give them my screenplay, it’s original and edgy, they buy it. I made it. I am a successful hollywood filmmaker. I work as a production assistant for a few years, the hours are extremely long, the people are fake. I wonder if this is what I want to be doing. It’s just a stepping stone, I tell myself, put in the hustle now and you’ll cash in eventually. I am exhausted, I never get very far. I am talented but overlooked, so is everyone. I move back to Chicago. I have no roots and I am completely lost, beginning my life over again in my late twenties. Winter is cold here and I’ve shed my toasted skin.


Chicago, IL

Right now I am at the base of a fountain of possibilities, each choice breaking off into tiny streams of water bursting towards the sky. I can see them all. I can see them moving forwards, intersecting in some places, others jutting off on their own. Some places along their paths are dark and unclear, but their general projection is mapped out in my mind. This is the most pivotal point in my lifetime, the next choices I make will heavily dictate the what kind of life I finish up with. I am on my tiptoes, dancing around the pebbles of water, tiny spheres structured by the possibilities. I am taking each step very carefully.

F. Scott Fitzgerald reminds me,“I dont suppose anybody ever deliberately listens to a watch or clock. You dont have to. You can be oblivious to the sound for a long while, then in a second of ticking it can create in the mind unbroken the long diminishing parade of time you didn’t hear.” It’s like that in years, too. You don’t remember each day ticking off the calendar and all of a sudden you create the long diminishing parade of time you didn’t hear. I am 25 years into my life right now. In 1.5 months I am filling my car with a few essential items and moving to Denver, Colorado.

Alan Watts convinced me that the past does not write the present, but rather the present writes the past. “We must abandon completely the notion of blaming the past for any kind of situation we’re in and reverse our thinking and see that the past always flows back from the present. That now is the creative point of life. So you see it’s like the idea of forgiving somebody, you change the meaning of the past by doing that…Also watch the flow of music. The melody as it’s expressed is changed by notes that come later. Just as the meaning of a sentence… you wait till later to find out what the sentence means… The present is always changing the past.” And it only just dawned on me, as I’m writing this here, that I am a writer. I am a riverbed guiding the flow of my life, and I create the characters and I create the reality I experience.

I am not a Hollywood filmmaker, but I am wildly okay with that. Because the thing about dreams, is that they evolve with us. I realized that I am not a filmmaker, I am a storyteller. My ability to turn stories into concrete images and language goes beyond film. It filters into business, it filters into the way I carry myself to the coffee shop. Now I help others tell their stories alongside my own. I can exist simultaneously as an artist and a business person. And in 1.5 months I will be closer to 26 and I will exist in Denver instead of Chicago and I can write again who I am and pick the parts of myself I want to call upon, to give a chance to drive my personality and general projection of self. I am my own experiment and it’s so strange that we can change the truth in reality.

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Andy Schu

Written by

Andy Schu

modern day transcendentalist | storyteller | littleshoestudios.com/andyschu

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