I can still hear his voice saying it.

Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time.

Can still smell the musty classroom and feel the dread that pervaded the room as my there-for-the-AP-credit peers sank into their chairs, preparing for another one of Mr. P’s impassioned lectures on the brilliance of Kurt Vonnegut’s “Slaughterhouse-Five,” praying he wouldn’t go all socratic method on them and ask for an opinion or two.

Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time, he begins again, as if we hadn’t heard him the first time.

Phones slid into hands under desks, as earbuds were inconspicuously tucked into ears, but I was listening. I was fascinated by the idea of coming unstuck in time or, perhaps more so, why my high school English teacher was so fascinated by it.

He loved that line.

He loved it in the kind of way that you could tell really haunted him and that didn’t make sense to us.

We were seniors and coming unstuck in time sounded like a scintillating disruption from the utter monotony that our days embodied back then. We would have loved if Vonnegut’s alien creatures, Tralmalfadorians, descended into that rancid classroom and offered to pull us through space and time until we couldn’t see straight. Our unmarred understanding of time afforded us such luxuries of fantasy.

We didn’t know that in just a few months, by the passage of a pandemic, we too would come unstuck in time, falling right through the ground that up until that point, we had no reason to believe was not solid.

But this isn’t about that.

This is about sitting in a bar in Manhattan, six years later, remembering none other than the words of Vonnegut as I feel myself coming momentarily unstuck in time, an experience so casual and recurring these days that I can’t believe I was ever so young as to wonder why Mr. P chose that line over all the others.

He would become my great literary guide that year, the one I should probably attribute the attainment of my own English degree to, but I never asked him what those words meant. Perhaps because it was a question that would invariably be met with a “Well, what do you think?”

I think now that it simply speaks to the general experience of being alive for longer than two decades. The experience of having collected enough memories of consciousness that most things remind you of other things. The bizarre feeling of swearing that you have time-traveled just as Billy Pilgrim did, for how else are you here, when you swear that only a moment ago, you were over there.

There, in California, standing in the sunken light of another warm day, watching the sun melt like a bar of gold over everything in sight.

To here, sitting in a bar that used to be an old tenement house on the Lower East Side with some friends, hearing the right song come on and snap you into one of those absurd instances of reflection where you look around and feel as if you were simply plucked out of a moment from long ago and placed directly into this one and you’re trying to figure out how you got from there to here.

Just how and when you, too, became unstuck in time.

Here, drinking lemony gin cocktails in a dark, cool bar with friends on a warm day of August in New York, realizing that, at some indistinguishable point between then and now, this became your life.

Which, really, only becomes all the stranger when you step outside and are greeted not with the relentless, sticky heat of another summer in the city, but an atmosphere of mid-70s with a warm breeze and that blue blue sky that seemed to backdrop the entirety of your childhood in California.

The kind of blue that makes you ache with a nostalgia so blistering that for whole moments at a time, you think it might eat you alive. You feel how far you are from the place where you were from, the place you would call home, if home hadn’t long since become so many things.

But then you see the iron fire escapes lining the streets of walkups that you fell in love with all those years ago, the ones you could very easily attribute the course of your now everyday life to, and the blistering nostalgia quietly nestles itself back into your bones where it surely always is, but surely is not always felt.