By Gurney Poe

Time, as you know it, is a polite fiction. A third-dimensional construct designed to keep things from happening all at once. Your clocks, your calendars, your obsessive need to mark birthdays and tax deadlines — these are merely tools to give the illusion that time is linear, flowing forward like a well-behaved river.

But if you’ve ever spilled coffee, forgotten a name, or suddenly remembered something embarrassing from ten years ago with the full force of emotional devastation, you already know: time does not flow. It splashes. It loops. It occasionally trips over itself and lands face-first in the soup.

Here in the third dimension, time is treated like a rope: long, unspooled, measured in seconds, minutes, and years. It’s convenient, sure. You can stretch it out, chop it up, and assign meaning to arbitrary chunks. “A year” is the time it takes for your planet to wander around its sun like a dog sniffing every tree in the park. “A second” is — well, technically it’s 9,192,631,770 oscillations of a cesium atom, but no one thinks about that while waiting for their microwaved burrito.

Yet even within this system, things get weird. A watched pot boils slower, a traffic light refuses to turn green until you blink, and vacations feel like they last forever until you get home and suddenly they were too short. Third-dimensional time is fickle. It appears to be a straight line, but everyone experiences it like an Escher staircase.

Ah, but in the fifth dimension, we no longer concern ourselves with the length of time. That’s baby talk. That’s measuring a shadow and calling it a sculpture. No, in the fifth dimension, time has width and height, and it’s far more interesting to measure those.

For example, the width of time determines how many possible realities can exist side by side. A thin time? Limited outcomes. A wide time? A multiversal buffet of possibilities where you both did and didn’t say something regrettable at that dinner party. (Spoiler: You did.)

And the height of time? Well, that’s a measure of its density — how much reality is packed into a single moment. Have you ever had a single second stretch so long it contained an eternity of embarrassment? That’s a tall moment. Or conversely, have you ever lived through an entire week that felt like one hazy blur? That’s a moment with all the height of a pancake.

By the time you reach the seventh dimension, time is like a bureaucrat with too much authority – technically in charge but incapable of making a single decision. The ninth dimension? Time stops pretending to be useful and instead becomes a smug riddle, endlessly folding in on itself just to prove a point.

But here’s the real secret: no matter how many dimensions you traverse, time remains subjective. It’s a matter of perspective. It bends under observation. It laughs at your schedules. It refuses to be truly measured because measurement implies containment, and time is about as containable as a cat in a bathtub.

So, go ahead. Mark your calendars. Set your alarms. Keep pretending that time is a simple, obedient thing. Meanwhile, I’ll be over here in the fifth dimension, measuring its height, checking its width, and making sure it doesn’t trip over itself again. Because trust me, when time falls, it does not land gracefully.