Is the dog’s—and our—anxiety driven by some slow dopamine drip, our synapses working like hourglasses, molecule after molecule, grain after grain? How do those clocks tick? What’s the reference point, the cesium standard of internal time? What’s the quartz crystal of our minds, human and animal alike?

I wrote once. Why didn’t I mention Argos? The faithful dog who waited for his master Odysseus for two decades, just to die upon recognizing him in a beggar.

I recently remembered him watching The Return, a deep and haunting take on the last part of the Odyssey, the one in which Odysseus is reunited with Ithaca, but not his people (until the very end).

Why did I forget Argos? Did Odysseus forget about him?

There is often a painful asymmetry in waiting and longing. In any two-body story, one part can become static: rooted, ruminative, soaked in anticipation, while the other stays dynamic, dragged forward by events, by the next island. Even if the moving part longs in moments of respite (Odysseus on Kirke’s island), the journey’s madness catches up again and pulls feeling back into motion.

And yet even the “traveler” falls into a trap: the destination becomes a kind of mirage you start to wait for without noticing. We tell ourselves we are moving toward something, while we become our own Argos, “actively waiting” for the arrival of the culminating moment which will justify the overstretched mind and swollen time.

There’s a scene in Synecdoche, New York where an actor asks the director: When are we gonna get an audience? It’s been seventeen years. We, the actual audience, already suspect there won’t be any “real audience”. But if “audience” is the destination, and we can clearly see its absence inside the film, why do we keep projecting destinations in our minds? We fill calendars. We stack tasks. We turn our days into long corridors lined with checkboxes. But each month of my busy life convinces me more that the only final outcome is the one depicted by Homer:

Twenty years had passed since Argos saw Odysseus,
and now he saw him for the final time—
then suddenly, black death took hold of him.

For quite some time, I’ve been treating my life as a musical performance. Because no piece of music has a destination No performer begins a piece with the thought of “arriving” at its last bar. The symphony is not a delivery mechanism of the final chord, nor is the orchestra.