Ghost Sign

André Silva

I used to look at photos on a wall,
And wonder what has become of those trapped in them.
Those lines, scattered across the surface, foreign.
Rivers of time, lakes of oblivion. 
I used to look at that face in the mirror,
And wonder what would become of it.
I saw no lines, just stillness.
Now, looking again at that mirror on the wall,
Framed like the photos of old, I wonder yet again.
With my eyes clouded,
I touch it (the face or the glass I do not know), 
And cry, gently caressed by the breeze of millennia,
Heavy, now, on my shoulders.

How funny it is to never notice time.
How funny it is to travel on the treadmill of History.
Until you become it. And disappear.

The Science

We have an inherent sense of time, also being good at performing timing tasks. However, we are biased by many factors that can alter judgments of duration and of passage of time. Our perception of time may also change with age, as time feels like speeding up as we age. When we are young it seems baffling having twice our current age. When we reach old age, it feels like the past is ill defined. This can be attributed to a decrease in novelty, smaller social networks, a perception of older events as being more recent, and newer events as having happened further into the past, and both normal and abnormal cognitive decline.

The Poet

André Silva is a Portuguese researcher at the Universities of Aveiro and Coimbra, Portugal. His PhD work focused on what happens to human attention, memory, and time perception when seeing people with different degrees of attractiveness. He currently studies the impact of virtual reality emotional priming and of neuromodulation on time perception, and the effect of chronotype and time of day on memory for faces. In his spare time, he writes short fiction, and is an avid Lego builder, board gamer, photographer, book reader, cinema buff, indie music explorer, biscuit eater, and ailurophile.

Next poem: halley's comet, 1986 by Christina Lux