The In Between Time

At the end of last year, I jumped off a cliff. It was into a dam, to be fair, and it was done because I was bored.

Said cliff was about 25 meters high (my father thinks higher, I think lower; we settled on something in between).

Physics tells me that I hit the water at approximately 80 kilometers per hour and that the jump lasted 2.02 seconds.

The jump itself was terrifying (I screamed like a baby) and the landing was painful (I dislocated my shoulder and bruised the whole right side of my body). But those 2.02 seconds where exhilarating.

Also last year, but this time at the beginning of it, I broke up with my boyfriend of three years.

The night we broke up, as I was driving home, there was this owl sitting in the road. It sat there until I drove my car right up next to it, looked at me for a few seconds, gave a little hoo-hoot and flew away.

At the time, it was nothing more than a surreal experience.

A few weeks ago, I had dinner with my landlords and thought to ask them about it. They’ve never seen the owl before.

Last night, exactly one year after the break up, I was driving home at about the same time of night. I saw (presumably) the same owl in exactly the same spot. Same story: drove up next to it, it looked at me, it hoo-hooted at me and it flew off.

Now, I mostly think like a scientist. And it’s most likely that this particular owl lives in this particular part of town at this particular time of year and has a penchant for perching on warm roads during chilly evenings. But the coincidence is creepy enough to make me consider, briefly, the possibility that it was a sign.

If it were (I doubt it) the Internet tells me that owls may be signs of change — a symbol that something is ending (my relationship) or something is beginning (unclear).

Sign or not, the one year book-ended by owl sightings was also a “time in between”. And it got me thinking…

We so often consider these in between moments (or years, as it may happen) as something that fills the spaces. They’re moments (or years) of blissful peacefulness or painful remembrance or willful ignorance.

We seldom think of them as time spans in their own right. Unlike the jump off the cliff, where the 2.02 seconds were what counted, the year between my old relationship and my still-non-existent new one was thought of as a time of nothing, at best of waiting. It was the time in between relationships.

What I failed to realize was that, in this time in between, I did a lot. I thought I fell in love (I didn’t); I had someone think they’d fallen in love with me (they hadn’t); I got a degree; I made new friends; I lost old friends; I re-discovered my love of music and dancing.

In this time in between — this time I kept thinking of as non-time, not-quite-time — I, somehow, built a life.

And, much like the cliff jump where others could hear the scream and the splash, everyone could see the “thing” that marked the start of this time-in-between and the end of it. No one else, however, could feel if it was worth it.

The astonishing thing is, we spend most of our lives “in between” things — most of our time is time in between — and most of our lives we wish we weren’t there. Most of our lives we wish that we’d moved on to the next thing, started the new chapter, spotted another owl.

Those 2.02 seconds, while worth the three weeks of my arm in a sling, would have been even more worth it if they’d lasted just a little bit longer. The breathlessness of those seconds, where one is entirely and utterly present without consideration of anything past yourself and this moment, was astoundingly beautiful.

And so was my year in between. If the second owl sighting does, in fact, mark the end of this time in between times, then I am forced to admit that it wasn’t. It was a life all on its own and to question whether the jump will be worth the landing.

While I know, now, that the end of that relationship was — most definitely — worth the landing, I wonder if I made the best use of fall? Did I embrace the year of being alone, of keeping to myself, of learning about myself and my field, as much as possible?

If I am honest — if we all are, I think — I would admit that I hope the owl was just an owl, who happens to live in this particular part of the world at this particular time of the year and has a penchant for perching on warm roads on chilly evenings.

If I’m honest, I hope that I am still in that time in between because, while it was decidedly longer than 2.02 seconds, it has been equally exhilarating.