The City Was Already Slow

The town had been praised for being slow.

That was unfortunate.

For a civilian, a slow coastal town could mean quiet streets, long meals, and relief from traffic. For a soldier already counting days, “slow” described the one thing that needed no encouragement.

Time was doing perfectly well on its own.

When we were finally allowed outside for a few hours, the town center felt very small. Choices that would have been ordinary in civilian life suddenly mattered: where to eat, where to sit, which direction to walk, how long we could stay before returning.

The problem was not really the town.

It was the way military service changed geography.

A civilian looks at a place and asks whether it is beautiful. A soldier on leave asks how many hours are available, what can be reached, and how quickly the return time will arrive. The same quiet street can feel peaceful to one person and almost stationary to another.

Even holidays became units of measurement. National days, religious holidays, weekends, birthdays — the calendar filled with markers because counting time had become part of daily life. A few months could contain an unreasonable number of breakfasts when you looked at them one by one.

The irony amused me even then.

We had been sent to a place officially proud of resisting speed.

We were already living inside a system where the clock moved slowly enough.

The town did not need to hurry for us.

We needed it to provide evidence that the outside world was still moving.