The different tempos of what happens: on not being in Honduras

Continental Airlines, bless them, extended a no-fee rescheduling of existing reservations only through the end of July, so when I reluctantly accepted the fact that our June 11 reservation would have to be cancelled, I rescheduled one week later. Now, two days out, it is clear that will not happen either; while I have yet to consult Continental's website, I assume there has been no change that would expand the time to reschedule dramatically.

But time has literally run out for me. I was only able to plan this trip, proposed in late May, because I had left the first two weeks in July untouched. That in turn was the outcome of deferring a jury duty call from January to July, and hoping that the claim that the average trial was a few days would be true. Now, after next week, each week has events and duties to carry out, so there is no time to return until the end of this year.

The strands weave in and out; jury duty flows seven months into the future; Honduras could fit in at the end of one possible week of trial, optimistically predicated on possibly deferring yet again into mid-August; flying to Honduras receded one week, and now, like an ocean wave, I see it moving all the way back to December.

My sense of time has become distorted these last three weeks, but at different scales. I spend a few minutes reading news, and six hours later straighten up with a pain in my neck. I wake up at 5:30 feeling alert, despite having less than four hours sleep, and then realize in mid-afternoon that I overlooked the intervening hours entirely. The week goes by and feels like many weeks, dotted with incidents, but with nothing real (meaning here, immediate) that I can recall happening.

And the most extraordinary: I read mail sent by a friend in Honduras working in resistance to the authoritarian regime. I worry, because increasingly the things she is sending, written in Spanish by scholars and activitists, bitterly examine the failure of the US to act, dissect the silences in State Department briefings, and propose that maybe this coup was not unwelcome, maybe it was even planned.

But I don't feel it is my place to argue with her; I am not, after all, living through this, it is not, after all, my country or my history at stake.

So when another of those copied, a Honduran historian, replies with a reminder that his work argues against Honduran history being solely the outcome of US decisions, I feel I can respond.

And so begins a three way exchange between us and a second historian, also a friend of long standing, in which as emails come in, it is sometimes hard to tell who is being challenged or reassured. In Spanish: amiga, that one is for me, reassurance that the frustration does not mean a friendship broken. In English: love you, that one is for whom?

And each message time-stamped individually, to the second. A conversation, but in counterpoint, and I cannot say who is addressing which of us.