AN INSECT CENTURY.

        An Insect Century is a condition of Dyschronometria in which an individual cannot accurately estimate the amount of time that has passed.  Time perception is a construction of chronological drift that is manipulable and distortable under certain circumstances. These temporal illusions help to expose the underlying mechanisms of time perception.

        Distorted time perception is often associated with cerebellar ataxia, a lack of spatial awareness, poor short term memory, and loss of focus (disorientation).  Regions of trauma and rate of indefinite or unfolding events may also alter the subjective experience of time.  Another’s impressions of the Insect Century may not be directly experienced or understood, but it can be objectively inferred through a number of conditions: accidental abuse, disease, and genetics.

        The Insect Century is a verifiable by an experiment wherein the duration between a sequence of consecutive stimuli is thought to be relatively longer or shorter than its actual elapsed time, due to the spatial/auditory/tactile/species separation between each consecutive stimuli. The Insect Century can be displayed when considering a journey made in two parts that take an equal amount of time. Between these two parts, the journey that covers more distance may appear to take longer than the journey covering less distance, even though they take an equal amount of time.

You worked at the church, waited for the animals of your family to die. Hundreds of acres of skin and skin and still no surprises.   No shreddings of recognized baggage, you had become natural enemies.

Legs moved like a hydraulic system, unnatural, mathematical.   Limbs controlled by blood pressure or judgements of lesser parts, meaningless movement in a complete and metallic and accurate machine.

They disgust us because they show us what we are, always, eventually.  Small, scattered.  Confused.  We took out the bed and then the whole room.

I remember a lot of movement without momentum.  Angular and divided, a stack of empty decisions rather than a new skeleton built of them.  I remember they came out like an ink storm on the sheets and bedspread.   Holes and lows and life sized set ups and interviews.  

Just introduce yourself to a stranger.  It’s exactly the same thing.  Sun came down, and you were looking at me.

Insects have their own scenery of denial.

An endless stream of modest success and failure and success stories.  Microscopically priced.  Near invisible penalties.  One payment a year instead of twelve.

Almost at random, an eruption of beginning and end.  Exoskeleton up and crashed.

Pins in the fingertips.  Deadline missed, guessed at us breaking up again.

Another room that tasted the same, a ringing in the ears, a shrinking in the space between shadow and skeleton.

You can wear people down, the longer you talk.  Lies and blind string, otherwise intelligent people ask for a rush of guilt too. All that filament, all the flickering for limbs.  Like six times one is one instead.  Don’t ever mistake activity for achievement, they already had a name for that, they called it the insect century.

Jillison.  Listen to me.

             Do you still have no idea what the problem is? I don't understand the arc, that's what you said.   Tired and unhappy, felt like a century on repeat.  Willfully entered into codependence you admitted.  Jillison.  Listen to me.  Your past comes with you.  If you have any insects, you have all of them.