It is the type of thing that adults say in small talk, “Where has this year gone?,” like talking about the weather.

“Can you believe there are Christmas decorations up in the supermarket already? Nat King Cole and Mariah Carey everywhere!” (Mariah, enough, your Christmas music drives me bonkers.)

“Every year it’s sooner!”

Adult small talk.

“You know, the older you get, the faster it goes,” people, often your senior, like to tell you.

Small talk it may be, but there is some truth here. Do you remember life as a child? Think to the insufferable countdown until your birthday, if you were a normal kid, or until the first day of school, if you were like me. FDOC was the second best day of the year. With its blank notebooks, new assignments and new classmates, the first day of school was glossy with hope. But traveling to Chile for the December break was hands-down the best day of the year, in part because of the anticipation of what would follow: two weeks of running around in my grandparents’ backyard with Sarah and Freddy and cousins in the number of a full soccer team, all of us barefoot and in bathing suits, until dinner time, like the savage little animals from Where The Wild Things Are.

I once had nefarious boss who did on occasion impart some good advice. “Be on time,” he said. “No, be early. Early is on time.” This resonated with me, because growing up in the Fisher family meant operating under rules of strict punctuality, as if we were a small military unit or the Von Trapp family. So when my Dad said we leave for the airport at 1600 hours, we were to be seated in the car with our seatbelts on by hour 1550.

Somewhere between then and now, time has taken on a different quality. It is still that arbitrary human construct that allows us stay organized and operate as a society. But I increasingly think of time as qualitative, carrying with it a feeling that can be cyclical.

Time in its discreteness still exists. There are strong befores and afters. New Yorkers talk about the city as “Before” and “After” 9/11. It has not been the same since, I am told by people who lived there throughout.

We all have our befores and afters – some traumatic and others full of light. Before and after the move. Before and after the birth of, or the death of. Before and after the relationship, or the breakup.

My life’s big before and after happened 14 years ago this week.  I close my eyes now and think of where I was, and how I was, and still I get that tightness in my throat, those creases in my forehead.

It was a difficult moment, best explained by a complete, inexplicable and unforeseeable loss of control. We were reading Richard Dawkins for a seminar. We sat around an oval hardwood table in discussion. As we chatted Selfish Gene, I ran to the bathroom, but threw up in the hallway on the way. There was that patch of dry skin beneath my chin that cracked and scabbed. There was that party with fruit punch and vodka where I was entirely outside of myself. There was that afternoon where I fell asleep in Lilly Library with the sun shining through the glass windows through to my cubicle, warming the side of my cheek that rested on my anthology of 18^th century French lit. Then came the collapse, hospitalization, diagnosis. Before and after.

I’ve spent the past 13 Novembers mourning that first one. It was anniversary 1 in the Autumn of 2004. The campus air at Duke had taken on that life-affirming coolness of fall. I filled my days with books and friends and cups of coffee, and I tried hard to make myself whole. When the calendar read November 18 for the first time, my inside was raw again.

I went into anniversary 2 now knowing that it might hurt. Julia and I spent the day together. We took a small propeller plane up 13,00 feet and jumped out, parachuting down to earth to views of the North Carolina foliage.

The years have felt like a buildup until the next anniversary, where I brace myself and mourn the profound loss from before to after.

This week is number 14. I can see I am growing older. Inside is less raw. Can I still remember the before? No longer with much clarity. I remember the before like a hazy morning. I try to imagine what it was like to feel more free. I try to picture that former self and am incredulous. Was that really me?

In conversation with a writer and friend who is as deep as he is bright, I wondered, “Could time somehow be related to consciousness?”

I’ve spent enough time in the after, and the before has become so faded, that anniversaries are no longer so relevant. I still think about my body’s self-betrayal, but I no longer feel the right to grieve. I was never entitled to more than this, was I? The universe owes me nothing. Before and after blur, and time simply just is.

I think back to a night at Duke. Julia and I went to an evening candle-lit reading of my favorite work by my favorite poet. I pulled out my annotated copy of “Four Quartets” the other day. The words are familiar yet strike me as new.

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

T. S. Eliot, “Four Quartets”