Time Collapse
It feels like a time collapse.
First, I’m at a rest area in Ann Arbor I know too well. I recline my driver’s seat, close my eyes, and conjure, as clearly as I can, my hand opening a door onto a gorgeous foyer. I picture my dogs swimming. Leashless days. I let myself imagine a life so far removed from the one I’m existing in. I have no real reason to believe any of it could happen.
At 11:11 a.m. one morning, I arrive at a fairytale of a home in Birmingham, Alabama. The road bends and thins, the interstates fall away behind me into a rumor of engines, the forest closes ranks, the ponds hold the sky like cupped hands, and there it is, a house that sprawls like it forgot to stop, with the ambition of a cathedral and the manners of a hug, set down on two acres of Alabama green. It’s a little European with the slightest touch of gothic, and it has a modern garage that almost shouldn’t work beside it, but does. It’s as if I’ve stepped out of a nightmare and into a dream.
I’m greeted into the gorgeous foyer and led into the kitchen, where Jana and I jump into dorky stances and wobble hop into each other’s arms, having found familiarity before acquaintance. I follow her from room to room, and we talk for hours, until evening. The floors can’t seem to decide what they are — hardwood carrying the warmth of old and new and anticipated footsteps, tile cool against bare feet, carpet muffling some of the rooms where sleep happens. There are six bedrooms, six bathrooms, three refrigerators, and a music room full of instruments. Upstairs, a stream of light falls across a sea of art supplies. At some point a butterfly lands on me and stays for the ride, about an hour of it.
Jana bends down to greet my dogs in the music room and says, “The year I learned about God was the year I learned dogs could live inside.” My heart skips. I tell her what a poetic line. In my happiest years, I found synchronicity in poetic lines. I silently promise to one day turn it into a poem.
We wander out through lush trees and gardens, down pathways just as fairytale-like, past a stream, a pond, a hot tub steaming like a bowl of rising ghosts, and a massive pool with a bridge and a waterfall pouring into it, a small endless play from gravity to stone. My pups would know what it is to swim. Not far from here are waterfalls and caverns. In the span of days, I initiated a drag show, swam naked in a river, made art. On any given day, you may find someone skipping down the street in a unicorn outfit or crawl on the roof to find someone naked, covered in mud with a leaf in her bush. I’ve wanted to casually dress in a similar style of Lisa Perry from the 90s or a steampunk Victorian man and nobody would bat an eye.
It feels like I’m making this up as I type it.
In a short span, I lost everything but my car and my dogs (thank goodness). My brother died. I left my beloved home to help my disabled mother out of state. My dear friend died, his car overturned in a river. My mother was diagnosed with cancer on top of her other illnesses. Between the big blows came the small ones, endless and back to back — my car got hit, my dog got Lyme disease, my credit took a dive, and on and on and on. I fell in love, it didn’t work out, and I lost a lot in that. Then my mother, the last of my family, died. Then most of what I owned, all of what mattered to me, was stolen from a storage unit.
My system was shot, and on top of it all I’ve been in the deepest, extremest, most inexplainable burnout. One of the two little loves of my life, my dog, was declining with his collapsing trachea, and we had lived nearly a year in a car, through the hottest temperatures and the coldest. Every day, morning to night, I waited on slow, shitty-paying gigs. Sometimes I grabbed a hotel. Often a rest area. Sometimes a Planet Fitness shower at 4 a.m. My days were so packed with survival, with constant motion, with burnout, with watching over a sick dog and hoping with everything in me I wouldn’t lose him too, that I never could have imagined myself here, in what one may consider a mansion, in Birmingham.
Jana spent thirty years as a psychologist and professor, and she saw through the system, saw the new world waiting beyond this one. Eventually she said fuck this. She saw the system, and every job inside it, as bullshit, and rather than simply preach it on the internet, she had some resources to do a thing and so she did the thing. She actually did something beyond speaking it. Her vision, her hope, is for everyone to open their doors and weave neighborhoods into networks until the system becomes irrelevant.
We are similar in this. I saw through the system at a very young age. I told people I wasn’t going to grow up because adulthood was a “prison.” I questioned everything. The Pledge of Allegiance felt creepy to me, and I knew the way we were living wasn’t right, a knowing that only grew with time. Jana, too, knew very young that something was off, and she wanted to “speak with the manager.”
I had been watching her Substack and TikTok for some time. “Come work on your books here. Stay as long as you’d like.” And suddenly these people who had been 2D in the palm of my hand were in front of me, greeting me with enthusiasm and open arms. Suddenly Krystle’s telling me we need to get my car cleaned out because I’m never going to feel what it is to live in a car again. Telling me she loves me and it’s for no other reason than that I am. Suddenly these beautiful people who talked about the fallacy of money and the system are welcoming me in celebration just for being alive and here, nothing to prove. Suddenly, Jana is looking at me with tears in her eyes, telling me how grateful she is that I am here. Not because of what I’d contributed or might contribute, not because of how well I’d participated in the system, but simply because I was there. Because I was me. And I am telling her I’m grateful for all she is, for having me, for the familiarity I find in her, for the soft unraveling my nervous system is doing in real time.
They are already living so far into the world beyond this one that Jana genuinely sees everything as everyone’s in a way I’ve never seen anyone actually live out. Though she used her resources to put this place together, because she genuinely sees and lives as if such things are all made up, if anyone suggests it’s her place, she quickly corrects them and says it’s our house, everyone’s house. They, we, live in a place outside of time. When I say I have to go find an income to pay my bills, they urge that I don’t. So when I say it’s different from the outside world as it currently stands, I mean it’s way different.
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What I appreciate about Jana, too, is that she genuinely sees and behaves as though nobody is above or below anyone else. Even about the shittiest behavior from people, she says, “If we were them, we’d be them.” That there is no more of a special soul, that we all are one fractalized by the made up system.
In the world outside of this place, I’d have never chosen to live with others. To be perceived, to negotiate my existence with other people’s expectations, to tiptoe around potential judgments. Here, it’s different. With such a vision and environment, there’s no judgment or expectation. In fact, it’s so very different, that when I get frustrated with myself for exhaustion or not being on, and therefore not being able to find the inspiration to write or make art, Jana tells me I need to stop and just go with what my body is calling for because everything else is just a story. Here, if your body wants to sleep all day, you sleep all day. If you want to smear yourself with paint or go roll in some mud, you go smear yourself with paint or go roll in some mud. If the dishes are sitting there but you want to go wade in a river, you go wade in a river. You do whatever is true and pleasurable to you at any given time. Whatever you’re called to do at any given time. Which is so opposite than the life inside capitalism we are so indoctrinated to.
I thought I had fully deconstructed. I’d spent years not only seeing through it all on my own, but unlearning more and more, questioning, refusing. Then I came here and realized there was some more, layers I hadn’t known were layers because I’d still been standing inside them my whole life, no matter how awake, the way a fish swims through water.
The main thing I’ve been pondering where this is concerned is differences of opinion and stakes. Particularly, just how manufactured stakes are outside such an environment where everyone’s truly free and living outside of the constructs.
Out there, a difference of opinion often arrives with made up stakes strapped to its back. Disagree with the wrong person and you might lose approval, belonging, a job, a friendship, a place at the table. So we brace. and we perform. We argue as if our lives depended on it, because in that world they often seem to depend on it, and we subscribe to that notion. But the stakes were usually never in the disagreement. They’re scaffolding built around it, manufactured and illusory, and we’ve lived inside it so long we treat it almost like the natural elements we live within.
Politics is where that scaffolding grows tallest, shows the most. A disagreement about how to run a country (which doesn’t truly exist, as they’re made up lines) turns into a referendum on whether you’re a decent human being. Whole lives get organized around the fight, and the people with the most power to profit from the fight keep it burning. People lose sight of each other, since the stakes are manufactured, and partake in the competitor mindset when it was never right vs left, but the hoarder class versus everone else all along.
If these stakes weren’t manufactured and stoked, people would simply go about their lives.
Here, there may be difference of opinion, of expression, of taste, and nothing happens. No one is punished, no one is exiled, and no one’s place in the house depends on the answer. People hold different views and go on living their lives, playing, laughing, and getting along. Without the manufactured stakes, a difference is just a difference. It’s information about another person, and sometimes it’s interesting. It’s never a threat.
This is where the time collapse really gets me. Standing in this house, I can feel two directions at once.
One is backward. I find myself rewinding, past the news cycles and the campaign seasons, past the flags and the pledges, past the borders drawn by people who never met the people they divided, to a time before any of these manufactured differences existed. A time before someone invented the categories, before there were sides to be on, when a person was just a person at a fire, with a hunger and a story and a pair of hands. I can’t claim to know exactly what that world was like, and of course it had its own troubles. But in part from it I can feel what’s missing from this one — the absence of the arbitrary stakes, the absence of a reason to treat a neighbor’s opinion as an act of war. The resulting fact that we have never been all that we are capable of being because of the system.
The other direction is forward. I fast-forward past the system entirely, to a world where it has shut down, or been shaken apart by a disaster, a collapse, some great unplugging. To where the system doesn’t exist because it can’t and just how manufactured everything is becomes forcefully apparent. And what strikes me is that the people in this house would be fine. More than fine, they’d be ready. They already live the reality that the walls between people are optional. They already share what they have, already call the house everyone’s, already treat the stranger at the door as someone to love. Already live as though money and time don’t exist. The things the system taught us to fight over would fall away the way scaffolding does when the building is finally finished, and what would be left is exactly what I see here — — people playing, doing what brings them pleasure, tending to each other when they feel called to, differing without dividing.
As Jana says in one of her videos, “So I’m gonna play Genie for us for a minute. Let’s imagine our big wish is granted, whatever your version of that is. So the revolution happened. The aliens landed. The rapture happened. Jesus returned. The singularity, the event. It’s done. It happened. Here we are on the other side of it. Now what? What do you want to do now?” She’s living it. We’re living it. So many people are waiting for the thing to happen. What if people stopped waiting and began to live as if it’s already happened?
Rewinding or fast-forwarding, I land in the same place. The manufactured stakes are not the foundation of anything. They are a layer in between, a long strange middle chapter, and on either side of it, before and after, is something simpler and kinder that people have always been capable of. This house isn’t a fantasy of the past or the future. It’s the two of them touching, a seam where I can stand and see both as one. That might be the real time collapse. Not the me on one side or the other side of struggle. But the collapse of a system that created time and every other fractalized problem we see, goodness on either side.
