How Do You See Time?

Written and illustrated by Ella Dino 

For as long as I can remember, time has been a visual construct to me. I’ve watched the months fly past me in color, and time creep by in a meticulously constructed grid. This web of seconds and minutes that stretch and warp into months and years perhaps began its inception where most good ideas do: the formative time spent in my kindergarten classroom. As I sat cross-legged on a multicolored carpet, time, almost suddenly, became a concept I was conscious of, all thanks to a calendrical display of birthday cakes hung neatly on the wall. There were three rows of four months each. The first month of the row was September, because that’s when the school year started. Each month was represented by a laminated cut out of a birthday cake. The cakes were themed and decorated based on various holidays or activities associated with each month — pink and red hearts on February’s cake, and jack-o-lanterns on October's. My teacher would write the names of each student in my class on the cake that represented their birth month, with the specific date next to each one. My name cheerfully sat at the top of February’s rosy-colored cake, ahead of most of my classmates in the new year. Even now, as January comes to an end and my birthday rounds the corner, time, in my mind, takes on this pinkish hue. 

When I think of time, I experience something that might resemble some form of grapheme-color synesthesia: experiencing words and letters in visual color. I have a very vivid image of the calendar year in my mind. The twelve months are spaced in an array of colored shapes, three precisely arranged rows of four months. Each of these months harbors an individual and unique palette of hues. October is orange with accents of black, January a pale icy blue, March is green like fresh grass. May is a sweet periwinkle, April a mishmash of pastel yellow and pink. November is a warm beige, almost a desaturated orange. December is gray and bordered in navy blue. February a vivid magenta, September a radiant yellow.  June is a sunny sky blue. August is a lively and warm red with just a hint of orange. July is a deep ocean blue. 

The first row of the calendar is the months September, October, November, and December. Then, the second row starts in January, and continues on from there. When the coolness of early May gives way to warm, and then hot summer sunshine, I feel like I’m reaching the bottom of the year. Summer creeps on to the right until that red, red August. When it’s September, I’ve sprung back up to the top of the year, and I can feel the end of the year reaching towards me. It’s as if I’m standing at the left of a room, and December 31st is standing parallel to me to the right, just a short distance away. I slowly shuffle to the right — towards October, then November, and then suddenly the year is over. Suddenly it’s January, which feels distinctly brighter than the four months that preceded it. January is bright and almost-blue in the way that a fresh start is, but still vaguely gray toned, in the way that the last dredges of winter always are.

I’m almost certain that this colorful perception of time can be attributed, at least partially, to the birthday cake wall calendar of my kindergarten classroom. The colors I envision for each month vaguely correspond to what I remember each birthday cake was colored as, although my memory is, truthfully, quite foggy. I think that perhaps my own interpretations of each month have seeped into each color over time, evolving into my own unique personal calendar. 

Every component of time— not just the organization of months — is composed in my mind very visually. I imagine weeks and days to be oriented in the way that they are on a normal calendar, as I’d assume most of us do: seven day weeks, beginning with Sunday and ending with Saturday, left to right, top to bottom. When it’s the end of the month, I feel my feet start to touch the empty, un-numbered space below the calendar until I land softly into the top of the next month. For hours, my visual cues aren’t quite as strong, but I typically envision rectangular hours stacked on top of each other. When the day crosses into the next, at midnight, 11 p.m. slants and tips towards 12 a.m. like a domino. I see years accumulate in a row of boxes that keeps stretching forward. Each decade begins a new row, and they vaguely stack upwards, getting indistinctly warmer in hue. The number 40, and the rest of that decade, is colored by a rusty shade of maroon. 80 feels perhaps more navy blue, bordering on indigo. The bright green age of 7 feels far away from my current 19 — an unidentified color that I cannot place.

I scoured the internet for the birthday cake printouts my kindergarten teacher hung on the wall. I found some that seemed vaguely familiar, but none that I was certain were exactly what she had used. It’s odd how these core, foundational memories permeate our minds for so long. Did I even perceive months, or seasons, or time at all before this grid of twelve birthday cakes was neatly hung in front of me? Did I understand that my birthday was a once-a-year occurrence, and was I aware that a year — this rigid length of time, exactly 365 days — had passed at all? Did I understand my age going up numerically meant that I was aging older? I can’t remember how my mind worked this early, early time in childhood enough to know. To a five year old me, a year was an entire fifth of my life. Surely the passage of time must have felt achingly slow — that is, if I detected the passage of time at all. 

There’s no organ in the human body that perceives time, in the way that our ears perceive sound and our noses perceive scent. It’s interesting how I’ve managed to understand it through sense anyways — by conceptualizing it visually. As I get older, will I see time differently? Will the colors of each month shift in hue, gray with age? Once I’ve graduated and my mental calendar no longer needs to be orientated around when I’m in school and when I’m on break, will the positioning of the months shift? How quickly will each year pass? January drags its feet, but time in November always seems to disappear. Will January someday blink by just as quickly? As the years accumulate, will I feel the physical weight of decades stacked like boxes? Will I enter my forties feeling tinged with maroon, or will my color be something completely different? 

As I grow older, I find that each passing year is no longer simply composed of twelve, roughly equivalent months in my mind. Instead the year splinters into distinct periods of time, of varying lengths, accumulations of weeks that I can’t quite justify sticking together for any reason other than it just feels right to. The end of August blurred so heavily into September into October that I couldn’t tell where one month ended and where one began while scrolling through my camera roll, but December had a sharp beginning, aware of itself. March was blissful, April an indistinctive blur, and May, as if April hadn’t existed, a continuation of that very green March.

I scroll through my photos and watch my hair grow longer and longer, a force of nature that I don’t understand or notice. Suddenly I am older and I don’t remember how long it took me to get to this age. I can’t understand that if I keep letting my hair grow without cutting it, it’ll be down to my hips in a year. Or that if I keep moving forward, day by day, soon I’ll be at an age that used to feel so distant it didn’t even seem real. Suddenly I am in a period of deep green after I spent so long in a gradient of uninspired grays. I don’t notice myself changing in the moments that I change, but I open my journal and read entries from years past, and realize that I have become someone new in ways I hadn’t expected. And I realize, too, that in many ways, I am still the kindergartener who saw rows of birthday cakes on the classroom wall.