The Absence of Time: The Listener and the Muse by Pace Ward
Suddenly I realize just how meaningless the commonly accepted increments of time are to me:
Seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks,
And I pray not months.
For these things no longer exist, much less function as measurements of time for me.
I no longer stand at my part-time night job counting down the seconds, minutes, hours until I can walk out the front door with my finger resting on the call button and your name selected in my contacts.
Because speaking with a blindfold over your face ultimately leads to your unmasking and the realization that you’ve only been speaking to a brick wall this entire time.
And speaking without laying eyes on the beauty that is you, my listener, can only suffice for so long.
So instead of counting down seconds, minutes, hours.
I have calculated the average number of times I am reminded of you and your absence throughout each of my shifts.
I have added and divided the number of times I am excused from class to the bathroom to cry or vomit in one day because being away from you makes me so sick.
And I have removed the face of my watch and replaced it with the fading memory of the beauty that is you, my muse.
This is how I tell time now.
Or rather, this is how I tell you about the ridiculous idea of it—time.
Time is nonexistent.
Ask the man who sits at the table in a fine diner with the girl he loves for the time.
You’ll learn that he left his watch at home for this trip because he was hoping for infinity.
And while I was once that man at the table with the beauty that is you, my dinner date,
I am now the man who sleeps on a bed of coals.
The man who, if you ask him for the time, can only answer in relativity to when the sun rises,
When he can awaken and gently peel the flesh that has melted from the smoldering wood.
His bed.
His resting place.
So never ask a man
Who is wandering to his car in the night
With tears in his eyes for the time.
Chances are, the face of his watch no longer remains, or possibly
Has been replaced with something impossible for you to see.
Something that may even be approaching the impossibility of being seen by him.
And the finger that once rested on the call button
May now rest on the trigger of the gun that he prays will allow for his own rest
On his bed of coals,
And this time he will rest forever, without being awakened by the man that will ask him for the time.
For he no longer remembers time.
Much like he can no longer sum up the courage to call the beauty that is you, a lingering ghost in his memory.
And his only solution may be to blow out the brain—
The mind—
That can no longer picture your face,
But only the blurring into focus of a brick wall as a blindfold is removed from his eyes.
Even though the only thing he strives so much to see is the beauty
That is you,
Or rather, isn’t.
Can no longer be you
Because he has lost such an image to the destructive force that is
And isn’t
Time away from you.
