Time is an arrow. We’ve all heard this before, how time is an entropic deteriorating force indicating loss. You can’t unbreak an egg that has fallen to the floor. You can’t reconstruct the disintegrated metal undone by rust over time. You can’t reverse aging and death. You can’t see the future, and you can never go back to the past. This is ultimately where the arrow lands, right? The end. It is the most unknowable thing, of all that is unknown.

In order to contend with the mystery, we have to be able to wrap our heads around the cyclical nature of our vibrant world, time, and the universe. We have to understand how things are neither beginning nor ending so much as they are phasing, transforming, in flux. Maybe if we understood time as a series of cycles or spirals, if we understood time through a queer lens, we’d do better with the time we have—and appreciate our pasts and futures better.

Let me give you an example of what queering time looks like for me.

Right now, my grandmother is sitting somewhere, legs crossed and leaning forward with her elbows on the kitchen table, muttering to me to not worry too much about death. She pulls a long, dramatic drag from her cigarette and snuffs out the last of it in her giant 1970s red plastic ashtray. As tenuous as our relationship was, it brings me comfort to know that as I write these words and as you read them, she and I are sitting in our weird thrifted wooden office chairs at that rickety wooden table. The early evening summertime sun streams in, all the way from the living room windows on the other side of the house, to rest on her face and the ancient wallpaper behind her. The vast silence of the space between her words is filled with heavy smoke and the firm punctuation of an extinguished cigarette. She and I are in that moment together, in stillness and in motion, our pasts and our futures forever intertwined. Neither of us will ever leave that moment or that place, but we have both moved beyond it—her in death, and me in life. Do you see? This is not an ending but a phase, a cycle, a flux.

Our detachment from cycles and spirals (and the opposing fixation on a binary past/present) leads us to think of apocalypse as cataclysm, as dystopia. This is a contemporary interpretation, its original etymology obscured through a warped Victorian lens. The Greek word for apocalypse, apokalyptein, means “to uncover what was hidden.” Apocalypse in its original sense is a disclosure, a revealing of truth. The Middle English translation goes further to describe insight, vision, hallucination—perhaps even a dream.

The queer life is apocalyptic. Our existence is built from excavating layers of revealed truths and great disclosures. The queer life bears endless cycles of beginnings, endings, and between-spaces. And so, the queer imagination requires a vibrancy that expands our vision beyond the past, but also beyond tomorrow—we have to divine our thriving futures and vividly dream of our vibrant presence there.

Our tendency to bend toward dystopia is of particular interest to me. Why are we drawn to this, when the possibilities of how we could thrive are so limitless? Those of us still carrying a belief in the systems we've been indoctrinated to uphold will struggle to imagine how to live and thrive through and beyond a cataclysmic end, let alone prevent it. The worst of us may even give up on all of us, bending toward cataclysm in their search for a departure from it. The future they envision is a wasteland because they are trapped in linear time, lost in the wake of an errant and accidentally entropic arrow. Where it lands, they believe, lies our end. They can’t imagine reconnection.

But we can. We used to have stories that guided us through our imagination to the other side of everything. Those stories are still with us, and we’re capable of not only remembering them but also creating new ones, together.

Creating good stories requires an investment in shifting our collective imagination, to nurture our queer imagination and relationship to queer time. What this looks like is a reframing of the way we engage in world-building by embracing liminality, hybridity, chimeric form, and multitudinous futures. This imagining is not just an intellectual exercise, but a practice leading to endless possibilities. Queerness inherently holds cycles of endings and beginnings in continuous acts of birth, death, recreation, and transformation. Queer imagination in queer time creates the space between moments to build worlds. World-building in this way offers a speculative projection into the future, an act of cocreation within dreamspace—an exercise of the anti-dystopian imagination to dream better for us all.

The dream, in this sense, is a place of generation, rather than escapism. It is a between-space of creativity and creation that has been acknowledged by cultures across the world since time immemorial. What does a dream do? It unseats and unsettles us from certainty, and it enacts transformative work in the queerest way. Queerness is a freedom of prescription that liberates our minds and our movement. It bends reality, space, gravity, and—yes—queerness bends time. The queer imagination dreams of building a place where the liminal is relational, where we are kith and kin, where we find a sense of intimacy and belonging.

To explore the dream in the context of imagination, queerness, and the cocreation of futures is to create spaces of possibility and expansiveness. The dream is a place where linear time is either unrecognizable or doesn’t exist or even stops, or where all time exists at once. The queer space of the dream is where all places stretch themselves across the same terrain, their topography merging together to form a hybrid place, both familiar and unfamiliar. In such a location, I imagine limitless transformation is possible. Such transformation, I imagine, leads to action in our waking world.

What does that look like? We hold fast to the future to fight for each other and all life, but also to fight for the way we celebrate each other and life through art, music, dance, food, storytelling, poetry, and every other way of expressing ourselves in truth, joy, and connectivity.

I can’t help but feel that the importance of cocreating the stories we need, for the time and the place where we are now, is more critical than ever. In this modality of being, we spiral back to the past not as a point of return, but a point of departure to learn what wisdom we can. We loop back around again to build on that wisdom and create the systems of knowledge we’ll need going forward. This is the undulating path of time, place, and connection I'm seeking. We can create a world we hope will be better in the lives and lifetimes of our descendants, in a future where they are joyful and thriving in a place that is lush, abundant, and beautiful. And maybe, in some small way, a ripple from that brilliant future unfurls across our lives in such a way that allows us to experience it in our lifetimes, too. ◼︎

Sharon Arnold (they/them) is an essayist, cultural interrogator, and educator. Their work emphasizes the presence and context of queerness, enchantment, and animism in everyday life, and it advocates for relational approaches that inspire cultural and community actions in solidarity toward better futures. Follow their work at dimensionsvariable.org.