Two weeks is a ridiculous forever (and we lived all of it)
Written on August 20th, 2025 by Zerotistic
There’s a line I keep returning to because it refuses to be decorative: life isn’t measured by time; it’s measured by moments (Armin Houman). On paper it looks like something you’d find on a mug. In practice, it was the only accounting system that made sense of those two weeks. The clock kept doing what clocks do: steady, indifferent. But what I brought home wasn’t hours. It was a handful of scenes that won’t let go.
Las Vegas was loud and bright and somehow blurry even while it was happening. It felt like a trailer that gives you explosions and not much plot. Washington was the film. The pacing changed. The people mattered more than the background. We weren’t a fixed number. Some days there were three of us, some days five, other days a bit more. The mix shifted without ceremony. No one tried to be interesting; nobody needed to audition. We didn’t schedule connection and then show up to it the way you show up to a meeting. We just stayed in rooms together and let the day do what it wanted. It was the absence of performance that made it feel like the right thing. I didn’t know happiness could be this undramatic.
I keep thinking about what sticks and what slides off. Not the skyline. Not a landmark. Memory is lazy and strange; it keeps what looks ordinary and carries it like contraband. An evening at the zoo that was more like a long exhale than an outing. A living room pretending to be an air-traffic tower: us looking at a tv, following a small plane icon as if keeping watch were a real job and friendship had a duty roster. Brunch that made the body forgive you for everything you’ve ever done to it. Smoothies that didn’t need commentary. A nod between two people at a first sip: this is good. Sometimes that’s enough language.
If I had to explain the rhythm of those days, I’d say they were built around staying. Not staying forever; staying long enough to feel like yourself in someone else’s space. We wandered a little, then came back to the same chairs and the same kitchen light and picked up a conversation exactly where we’d put it down the day before. We didn’t chase moments. We gave them a place to land. It’s different.
Around eight, the city turned soft. The air got thick and the cicadas switched on, and we walked to the grocery store for almost nothing. That walk is what I want to keep. There was no goal in it; we weren’t improving ourselves or collecting anything. The humidity made thinking optional. The sound the insects made was a kind of low electricity threaded through the trees, and our talk dropped to the level where words stop auditioning for meaning and just serve it. People like to say that meaning is a possession, an object you can put on a shelf. I’m convinced it’s a way of paying attention. This walk was proof. We paid attention to almost nothing and found it full.
Something went wrong, because something always does if the days are worth remembering. A couple nights slipped out of hand. It wasn’t cinematic; it was the usual: someone went past their limit, then a familiar list: water, cool towel, trash bag, hand on the back, quiet check-ins that sound like small talk but are actually triage. There’s nothing majestic about any of it, and yet there’s a kind of clean love there that I trust more than any speech. “I’ve got you,” translated into tasks. The next day, we laughed: not to erase it, not to belittle it, but to file it under “survivable.” Laughter can be an insult; it can also be a receipt.
It would be tidy to claim I came back transformed. I didn’t. There was no revelation. No vow. But something small shifted position, like a stone in a shoe that finally moves and frees up the foot. The idea of living closer to these people went from “maybe” to “maybe, actually.” That’s not romantic. It’s logistical. If life is measured in moments, then proximity is a strategy, not a luxury. You can’t collect what you can’t reach.
A person could say the trip didn’t “do” much. We didn’t conquer anything. We didn’t even try. We didn’t line up sunrise hikes or tear through a checklist of attractions to prove we’d been somewhere. We stayed up and slept in. We made plans with the kind of confidence that only comes from knowing you’ll cancel them and be fine. The day worked because we weren’t trying to squeeze value out of it. That’s a lesson that doesn’t fit in a post, because it’s not an argument; it’s a sensation. It’s the way a room feels when nobody needs to impress anyone else and there is cold water in the fridge (or beer; lots of it).
On the question of what matters, I keep circling the same answer: the smallest repeatable units. The light over a sink. The sound of ice settling after it’s poured. The shape of two elbows on the same table. These are not quotable. They don’t have weight if you list them. But in a life where you spend most of your hours alone or rushing or distracted, they feel like proof that human beings can still be simple with each other, and that simplicity is not a downgrade. I’ve read enough philosophy to distrust anything that calls itself meaning too loudly. But I trust this: a few good hours in an unremarkable room.
Leaving disguises itself as logistics. There are bags and doors and rides and airport codes. The body does what it has to do. The mind runs behind, carrying a box with no label. Home was quiet in a way that didn’t feel like rest. The silence after being with people is different from ordinary silence: it’s a kind of echo, the negative of a sound you’re still hearing. There’s a tax on joy, and it gets collected when you set your keys down and the apartment answers with nothing.
The easiest way to defraud that tax is to pretend it wasn’t that good. I didn’t. It was that good. So I paid up, which just means I sat there for a while in the quiet and let it be as sad as it wanted to be. Gratitude doesn’t cancel sadness; it gives it clean edges. I’m glad I went. I was sad it ended. These are compatible truths.
I’ve been thinking about attention as a moral practice. Not a big one: just the daily decision to look at what you’re actually in. We’re trained to curate, to save the thing for later, to prove to a future audience that we were there, as if “there” isn’t already the gift. I don’t have an object from the trip. No ticket stub or wristband or anything I can set on a shelf. Part of me regrets that, because I like anchors. Part of me thinks the lack is honest. If the anchor exists, it’s how our days changed my sense of what counts.
There is also the plain fact that memories decay. We rewrite them without permission and call the result “true.” I’m not trying to build a museum exhibit out of those two weeks. Museums are for things that don’t move anymore. This was alive. The version I’m writing now will be wrong in six months. The colors will shift. Something small will drop out. Something else will sharpen. That’s not a problem; that’s how a tribute keeps breathing. If it’s perfect, it’s over. I don’t want it over.
It would be clean to declare that I learned some lesson, and I suppose I did, but it isn’t a slogan. It’s a habit I want to keep: show up, sit down, stop trying to wring every minute for meaning. Let minutes prove it on their own. Arrange a few simple frames and let the people do the rest. Make grocery trips at an hour that turns the street forgiving. If there is theology in friendship, it’s probably just that: being around when the invisible part ends.
You could ask why this matters. It’s just two weeks, just friends, just summer. There are bigger stories and louder ones. But there’s a quiet tyranny in the idea that only difficult or public things deserve our attention. You can spend your whole life passing over the good because it doesn’t announce itself. Or you can notice it and call it what it is. I keep choosing the second one now, because those two weeks made it easy to see what I was losing by not doing it. Meaning isn’t hiding; I was.
If you want the short version: we were together, and it worked. The days behaved. The nights were kind except when they weren’t, and when they weren’t, we handled it. We made dumb jokes to hold the corners down. We turned a living room into a control tower because sometimes you need to pretend you’re in charge of the sky to admit you care that someone’s in it. We drank things that tasted like mercy. We walked for no reason while the air argued with our skin. We watched out for each other in small, measurable ways. Then it ended, like everything that proves it’s alive by not letting you keep it.
If you want the long version, you just read it, and it’s still inadequate. The longer the thing you’re trying to describe, the simpler the sentence needs to be. So here it is without any ornaments: I loved the time. I love the people who made it. That’s the whole tribute, stripped to the studs. Everything else is a way of making the sentence last longer without lying.
It would be sensible to close with a plan. I don’t have one. I have a direction: closer. I have willingness: say yes when the next small chance to be in the same room appears. I have the memory of what eight o’clock felt like, and the sound of cicadas doing their crude electric work, and the way the air pressed its hand to our backs so we’d keep walking. Those are my instructions. That’s enough choreography for a life.
Two weeks is nothing. Two weeks is everything. Time did what it always does: pass without apology. We did something else: we paid attention until ordinary hours admitted they were precious. If life is measured by moments, then we counted correctly. The numbers add up. The math holds. I can show you the proof, but you’d have to have been there to see it.