7:09 PM

I

He figured that if time passed surely it would help stale his problems even through the thick of life. But all time did was make him thirty and stagnant in the same old routine with the same old habits that never died hard. Waking up with just enough time to throw his legs into some denim and some leftovers into a black plastic bag, before performing his shallow march to the 8:15 am bus.

Somethings just never turned with the time—besides his skin and complexion, all remained the same. Late wake up, dirty denim, and a lunch packed knotted like dog shit. Those problems remained bedside on his nightstand with the one woman he ever truly loved. She lived secured behind a tiny glass panel and undusted wooden frame. “Buenos dias, Mama,” was ritual when looking at her before getting up in the mornings, and “Buenos noches” was more a spur-of-the-moment saying.

Next to her stayed his sleep aid: Whiskey and the Bible, which time and alcohol consumption only made him wearier of religion. Still, having the bible and his angel next to his sin seemed more appropriate to him than sacrilegious. He’d read it, whatever page he opened to whenever, before opening up the whiskey and throwing back as many swigs needed to fire up the stillness of time. Putting some motion into what already lacked tranquility, because he felt it was his way of telling time to move rather than the other way around.

No matter how many times he drank whiskey, it always burned a hole in the back-left side of his head and scorched his heart, forcing his head to look over his right shoulder to the right side of the room. There lived an entirely different, more feminine and peaceful entity which time posed no threat upon because he wouldn’t let it. Everything on that side of the room remained the same, except for its smell which he now possessed with his body odor and the stench of abstinence. Oh, and the bible, he borrowed from her bookshelf was of course removed from its original position. The only book he every had the nerve to take out of respect for her absent yet present spirit after she left.

Time turned his problems riper, and he could only assume how time tortured her after their split. When his mother passed, he looked more at the sky and missed the wonders of the world around him, including the very woman who helped put his mother in the ground. The sky and its blues and reds denied him of looking to the floors he’d been standing on and at the people who’d been wondering where he’d gone. So, they left before he could return his neck to its neutral posture to transact their concern with optimism. One of those people being his ex-girlfriend, who’d been helping turn his bachelor pad into a safe haven for two.

She barely left when she said she was leaving. She left everything because it was clear that she didn’t know what to do or where she was going. But she knew she had to go, to make him look down and realize the heartache of life and not only the heartache of death. She moved out and left everything behind so that he couldn’t regress to the life he had before because then there wouldn’t be a point to any of it.

On her side remained a dresser with several pairs of jeans, some five or so shirts, and lots of cheap jewelry. There was also a marron perfume bottle that reeked of cherry and piss, it too was cheap. There was a bookshelf with levels that twisted and turned at the heaviness of the books. Bending to distribute the weight of knowledge and literature, throwing books on top of each other. Books that leaned on one another like people on the 11:00 pm bus rides home. The books sat it slumber just before she left and even more after. Until he took the bible for guidance and perhaps to lean on in his moments of terrifying restlessness and immobility.

It wasn’t her not being there that crippled him, it was him coming to some delusional conclusion that she would one day return to help him cap that whiskey, believe that scripture, and dust that contained memory. She left sometime in January, when the trees looked like eye veins, pulsing with the blood of the earth. But the leaves that fled for the fall and winter did return in the summer, but she didn’t, and nothing from before their conglomeration did either. He’d been bound to this iced reality of waking up drunk and falling asleep even drunker with some trade work in between.

II

This is where the extremities of the world mingled in an internal wildfire that radiated from his core out to the tingling of his skin. When he learned of his mother’s passing, he was on duty, installing cables for five separate households—some of four and some of one. Two of the installations had been in the same apartment complex, after completing the first one, he trudged to the second installation a couple of floors down.

He ignored the first call from his girlfriend, seamlessly and with no hesitation. They had been fighting for months, and on this one day, when the sun seemed to be avoiding all of the clouds, he wanted to follow suit. He did the same with the second call and the third, hanging up with intention. But the buzzing, that insufferable buzzing that emerged from the left side of his pant, never ceased. He recalls that buzzing, that vibration as endless and enteral, because surely it never began and never ended.

He picked up the fourth call because at that point it felt like one long summoning phone call. Then she spoke the words of undeniable mortality, which he denied and denied until he could no longer speak from the shock. That buzzing no longer shook the seams of his jean pockets, instead somehow, perhaps entering through his ear canal, that vibration rocked his whole body to the verge of collapse. His skin, soul, and body, all of which had felt little to nothing for quite some time, consumed itself like flesh tearing from bone. His soul floated from its foundation, and its vessel threw his head back, positioning his eyes towards sky to look at the separation of livelihood and existence. All that sunk below his vision were the tears the fell back, down under, from his eyes.

Despite his reaction, this was no news. He’d known this day was approaching for months now. Inside of his mind he’d tried using his trade skills to wire a mind that was insusceptible to grief and emotion. To some capacity, it worked. He hadn’t loved the woman who chose his lonely being out of a pool of even lonelier individuals. It had been months since they merged flesh to flesh and soul to soul. He figured to learn how to not hurt, you must learn how to not love, promising himself that matrimony wouldn’t exist in his life path, not if he could control it.

He stopped visiting his mother in the hospital because he needed to begin existing without her by choice rather than the world making that choice for him. Two months before her death, he paid her his last visit and refused to say anything other than words that held the same sentiment as ‘goodbye.’

In those two months, he went about the world like a ship at sea, fighting waves while creating them. Trying to forget to forget so that he just simply wouldn’t remember: the girlfriend, the mother, and the time that was lapsing unforgivably. All that wear and tear, all that trouble, for the moment when all that suppressed itself returned in a frenzy to feel lived. A phone call, that when answered, broke a dam and flooded into the tsunami that is grief. 

III

He’d felt as if she chained down time with the weight of her love, and whether or not this was positive didn’t matter. It was her ability to make the forever ticking bomb slow down, if only for a second, that made him stay.

When they first met in a laundromat, where she approached him to ask for some fabric softener, he prolonged the unwanted conversation, so that time wouldn’t feel so fast and so apparent. Talking to her was dreadful, but looking at her was more bearable, and in the physical he found the desire to be with her. At the end of the otherwise awkward exchange, he asked for her number, and she said, “Only if I can get that fabric softener I asked for.”

A week later, he planned a date with the end goal of witnessing her body groove in the midnight’s moonlight that showed every crevasse of the dark. They went for coffee, and she talked so much that the first hour seemed like they’d been sitting there in that same crisply brown booth for a week. He responded to all her sentences with umms and oohhhs, and she took it as good listening. Until she began asking the questions that required him to indulge her with memories he’d been trying to avoid since their creation.

Although he didn’t want to answer them, he did. Because an inconsiderate man, he was not; he was rather kind to almost everyone at first and would loan pieces of himself to any individual who asked. She asked about his childhood, and he let her know that he was born and raised there in Pennsylvania and was of Cuban heritage, but not really knowledgeable of his culture. She asked how come, and he said something along the lines of “time just didn’t allow. My mom was always busy.”

The slow burning conversations pointed out some similarities in the two: they were both Hispanic, but spoke no Spanish, and came from single parent households were there was very little room to breathe. At that point in the conversation, he felt time speeding up again and asked of the shows she was into even though he had no interest in that topic. He just needed more time to think of not thinking and ask her back to one of their places. She yapped and he stared at her and her cleavage, and the wall with the clock, occasionally focusing on the tiny hand, trying to force it to stop with the pressure of being viewed. But it never did.

This date was all she needed, the only rope she needed, to yank herself into inner visions of the two being in love. She was 24, six years younger than him, hoping that she could learn how to be the woman a man wants. Out of all the men she could have chosen with her youthful draw, she chose the man who looked lost at sea, because he looked the most like her first lover.

They eventually made it back to him place because she had roommates she didn’t want to wake. She undressed herself and laid naked on his blue bedding, for him to look at her for a minute. She undid his belt buckle, stared into his drifting eyes, and took him in underneath the invading streetlamp light he’d been mistaking for moonlight all these years. A net of thick air draped over them, getting heavier with every exhale.

IV

Every day was the same, up at 7:45 am, usually, and down by midnight at the latest. Except on the two-year anniversary of his mother’s passing, he didn’t return from work around 6:00 pm and didn’t touch the whiskey nor read the bible. Instead, to avoid looking at her portrait, he sat on the opposite side of the bed. The side that was once his girlfriends, was now his place to avoid feeling the slippage of time.

When sitting to read the palm of his hands became boring and pointless, he began to read the time off a clock on the right side of her bookshelf. By that point, it was 7:09 pm. Something about that hour and minute made him realize just how much time had passed by without a nod to his existence or the corpses he mourned day in and day out. A strenuous grunt evolved from a rage so profound and debilitating, and from it pronounced a dialogue with the clock that spoke back in ticks and tocks.

“I can’t do this,” he moaned.

“Why not?” The Clock's hands now frozen and the time now stuck at 7:09 pm.

“My mother,” he choked, “she was a wonderful woman. I wish I was there for her when it happened. I leave this world every day, and I leave it alone with no one next to me, and there is this pain in me that is too much to handle alone. But I do it, because she did it.”

“Why can’t you do it now then?” the Clock spoke in simplicity.

“I can’t keep doing this. I want you to stop making me do this, I want you to stop, because when you stop nothing is happening, nothing can happen, no one can leave, and no one can feel. I can be at peace like when I was young. When you stop, I can stop.” He spoke rapidly, and manically, to the clock whose sounds were only conceivable by him.

“But I’ve stopped.”

He read the Clock again, the time standing still at 7:09 pm. Sitting as still as the Waters before Winds and Tides—sitting impossibly still. Sitting still, with no gears turning and no cloud about his apartment building moving, no cars shifting, and no thought existing.

“Then, I am not here,” he cried at the Clock.

“Oh, but you are. What is it that you feel? Tell me.” The Clock spoke with certainty, even though the certainty of its purpose at that moment was non-existent.

“No, I’m not here. There is no way that time can stop. I am talking to a fucking clock. I feel crazy. I am crazy,” the words projected from the heat of his heart too fast for his brain’s censoring or care.

“You are here, you and I are both here speaking to one another. A long time now, you’ve been asking me to stop. Using people to alter my existence, my evolution. You’ve uttered terrible things about me and cursed me in the corners of your mind. You wonder what would be like if time wasn’t, and this is the answer. You don’t like it, do you?” The Clock was cut short.

“What the fuck did I do? Why the fuck are you talking right now? Clocks aren’t supposed to talk…” the man’s words snoozed by an omnipotent intonation.

“And time isn’t supposed to stop!” The clock continued: “Yet, here you are...stopping it. When I spoke with your mother, it was about serious, more urgent matters. She’d been in pain for several months at that point and asked for more time because she wanted to see her son before she ceased. I turned and wielded her time to proceed for two more months until her pain grew unbearable, both inside and outside of her heart. She endured for you, and yet you cannot endure for love even through sickness, even through grief.”

“That is not true,” he wept, but no tears signaled such. Just a voice so tender it fell apart with the wheezes of breaths trying to escape him. “I saw her, but it hurt. It took so much to see her like that. I did see her though. She was mi mama. I just couldn’t keep seeing her like that. It was like the more time passed the worse everything got. So, I just wanted it to stop. I wanted it to stop for a long time. From when she first got sick, to when she...died.” He paused and hesitated to say that final word. Though it’d been two years, it still felt wrong to accept or even fathom that reality.

“Time,” the clock resumed, and its hands began ticking right down its face and then left back up at its equator, “will continue as is, until it does not. For each person in the world, the fight to control time is pointless, yet the objective remains lively amongst those who’ve yet to learn this. Time shall cease for each and everyone, including you, but know existing is not parallel to time.”

The clock’s hand stopped just before reaching 7:10 pm, it continued speaking with great wisdom in a rhythmic chant. “Here you are suspended in time, and you think this is my doing since my hands refuse to move. But this is your doing; this is your existence, time being a marker of that, and your existence has ceased long before my ultimate calling.”

“You froze your life with whiskey and ridicules of hope and faith. You froze your life in space —look at this room! You froze your life in denial and grief. And today, you call for the strike of time, because you can no longer endure. Your body and mind…they can no longer tolerate not existing. Therefore, I take your time.”

The pilgrimage of skin, blood, cells terminated, as he watched time resume its regular course. He looked at the photo of his mother, and then to his ex-girlfriend’s bookshelf, and then to his own reflection in the clock’s glass face. The cultivation of life no longer pursued its venture in his soul. An attack from within, the hearts final beat into a burst. A burn, now a growing anguish, forced his head over his right shoulder to look back into his mother’s eyes. There was final tug at the shirt covering his chest, where he tried to find his heart’s strings before the relief of time’s termination. The clock read 7:56 pm.