Time, Out Of Order

The morning doesn't begin, it arrives halfway through something.

The coffee is already cold, as if I've been sitting here longer than I remember.

Somewhere a watch is ticking, not loudly, just enough to remind me that time is still moving, even when nothing else is.

Christmas morning comes and goes, it never even asked if it could and why should it. The pain it brings, a reminder of broken promises.

Clear air, sharp, cold and crisp and sharp light. The kind that makes everything feel almost permanent.

Your voice is carried across the distance.

''I bought myself a watch''

You said it like it was a small thing, but it stayed, wrapped around my brain, like frost that doesn't melt even after the sun has risen in the cold, cold sky.

I see you again but not where you belong in time, you are sitting on my sofa in your bathrobe, your leg stretched out pale, cyanotic. Like something already leaving.

''Still taking your medication?''

The question sounds like something I rehearsed, well I've said it to enough patients. But to you I ask it because I don't know what else to say.

You shrug.

''Doesn't matter anymore, when I'm dead, I'm dead''

The words don't land all at once, they reverberate around in my head. Arriving slowly long after they were spoken.

Outside something moves, a door slams shut, the voice of the refuse collectors at 3am. Life continues in its usual order. They are unaware that something has slipped out of place.

The call comes before or was it after? I can never quite recall.

A walk home, night folding into morning. A new day, a New Year. That quiet hour where the world hesitates.

Your race was run.

It sounds like a sentence, that should mean more. Like you should get a prize. But meaning doesn't arrive immediately. It seeps in later through ordinary moments.

They wanted to take your leg, you said no.

''Came in with two and that's the way I'm leaving'' stubborn old fool.

There are things we hold onto even when everything is going. As if choice is the last piece of ourselves we refuse to surrender. Is that the prize?

The watch again, I return to it without meaning to.

Does it still tick, or did it stop the moment you did.

I imagine it resting somewhere face turned upward hands fixed and pointing at nothing.

What is this life all about and this bed in which I lie. The question doesn't belong to a moment, the moment, it drifts between then and now, never fully settling.

The room feels colder, not the clean cold of winter mornings, but something quieter. Something that lingers in the space between objects , in the chair across from me, in the pause before I speak.

We were meant to talk again. New Year's Day. A simple thing, a continuation. But time doesn't always move forward, sometimes it breaks and leaves pieces scattered.

The coffee is cold again, or is it, still. I can't tell.

And somewhere, just out of reach, everything is still happening, in the wrong order. Exactly as it should. The