Sliced

I like an analogue clock. I do not like the surprise of a new minute appearing suddenly on a digital read-out. I like to see the seconds marching in a circle, prodded by the unfeeling stick of the minute hand. Inexorable and without emotion, it tells the truth.

I also like things to eat that are sliced thinly. Those things are prepared to be consumed without effort, my consumption of same creatively variable in how I put those things together, identifying layers of intensity with my tongue and with my mouth. Cold turkey, very dead in great slabs sliced thick or delicate suggestions of fragrant provolone, the fat contained therein bearable, almost wanting.

If I could slice time and consume it, if I only could, it would be kept so, sliced, ready for me to savour, in a box, dark and small. The seconds could be laminated against each other so that I could hold a second or an hour in my mouth until it warmed and then, I would swallow. Then, I would consider how much I had reserved for a future tasting, safe in my box.

Blood rises to the surface of my skin and I feel it pause there before draining away, leaving me cold again. One day, I know, the ebb will have no flow. One day, the layers will be gone. Sooner, rather than later, the artificial construct that I apply to the equally artificial divisions of the fluid passage of time will have no meaning to me, not will anything else. I will be a cipher; null.

Yet, in the great imagining that is this existence, all is artifice and busy work, a diversion against the reality of mortality. I live now, but I will die just as will you and you and you. Absent from me is ‘existential angst’. I am of a certain age where time belongs to the younger, that illusion to be borne by them. So, I relieve myself of the duty to that illusion and instead, realise my freedom to choose how, what, when, even though it is not for me to say why. That, too, is for those who come after — to comment, analyse, critique, judge.

At least, it will give them something to do while they wait for the stick of time to go ’round once more, until it blurs and darkens and finally, fades away, for them, too.