He found himself momentarily paused in the chewing-gum-ness of time. Clocks had thrown themselves out and in before, expanded, contracted. Hands pulled the minutes and pushed the hours. It happened in the searing agony of pain, when his body bent towards death. In letters of rejection, when the future seemed to fall right away. In spaces of memory, when photographs of the past crashingly hurtled events back into the now. In lingering looks of desire and all the promises that yearned to be spoken. Music brought countlessness and endlessness into four minutes, certain touches would warm his skin long past the first brushing of limbs.

The times he held his face stonily unmoved as tears gathered in his head, those felt like eternities. Also conversations that demanded unconscious replaying deep into coming nights. As he became older, he tried to impose limits on time, bordering it with calendars, stopwatches, routines. He would, with mechanical regularity, abandon himself to its scorn through alcohol, and envelop himself in its mendacity through pills, potions and smoke. Eventually, at moments of pause such as this, he simply succumbed to the relativity of it all. He left his office, locked the toilet door, and sat, and sat, slumped, boneless. Flora had died today. It began and ended there.