Clocks

I'm supposed to be sitting and reading right now but the words don't even have the decency to blur on the page, they simply pass through my brain without leaving the slightest mark and I find I'm five pages away from where I started with no knowledge of what happened between the end of chapter nineteen and the start of twenty-one. I've been staring at the clock and kind of half-listening to the noise of it knocking gently on my eardrums, remembering the drawing in a comic I read some time ago with words where the numbers should be and a red second hand ticking off the time--You're. Still. Not. Dead. You're. Still. Not Dead. 

The clock is right next to the mirror and from where I sit I can see its reflection in the glass, the second hand going around and around backwards and ticking back in time. I wonder if the clocks in CS Lewis' Wonderland in Through the Looking Glass ticked backward, sending their observers further into the past while ours ticked forward into the future. I wonder if I stare long enough into the mirror-clock I'll start recovering lost time.

Time is a funny thing these days; so few people wear watches but we are no less choked by time. Alarms, timers, and calendar events clang, honk, blare, and ring out every moment with a great clamor and tell us where we are supposed to be. The girl hurrying by with an old-fashioned klaxon blaring from her pocket will not lose her harried expression even when she arrives at her lunch meeting three minutes ahead of time. If she stops on the way she is not marveling at the dark, smoky scent of coffee in the warm air of the shop, nor at the rich and bitter flavor as the first sip scalds her tongue; she fidgets, looking at her watch (a relic of an older time, its second hand still travels constantly into the future, it still has a second hand at all) and she begrudges her coffee the moments it takes to brew.

Yet when she hurried by me on my own sidewalk journey today, I paid her no more mind than a moment of annoyance for the noise of her blaring alarm, too busy myself with hurrying on my own way, checking my own wrist for the time before remembering my watch battery died six months ago and it matters nothing if my wrist says it is half past freckle-o-clock, however perfectly formed and a lovely brown color that freckle may be. My watch, digital rather than analogue, had no second hand, no metronome ticking off my time, but its weight was a comfort, a little piece of captive time clasping my wrist so comfortably that I only noticed it in its infrequent absence. I had worn a watch for almost a decade, had seldom been parted from one model or another from the time I was but ten years old, and the small device had once upon a time been such a part of me that if I lost my watch or broke it or seemingly let it be stolen like those few fretful days in fifth grade when I suffered separation anxiety for an object and found it necessary to comfort myself with the meager substitute of a thick hairband around the lonely wrist, though its squeeze was nothing compared to the feeling of recompletion when I bought another watch again.

But when my watch face ceased to show the time in March, lacking a means to replace the battery, I simply packed it away until I could take it to be repaired properly. There were many freckle-o-clock time checks in those first few days, but by the time I at last rememebred that I was supposed to be missing a watch I had ceased to notice the lack. I wear no watch now, but I tick nonetheless. The rhythm of life around me wanders or scurries or saunters by, sweeping around me even as I check my phone for the time.

Two minutes late. Luckily, while my mind has been wandering along far-off streets, my feet have hurried on.