Hours

Another terribleminds challenge: Song Shuffle Stories. When I rolled the dice, I came up with Hours by Tycho. Not much to draw from in the song itself (I use it for work/writing music), but I wanted to participate and not cheat, so I whipped something up and wrote it in second person for fun. Thanks for stopping by to read.

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Time has always been a difficult concept for you to get your head around. It never seems to flow quite the way you’d expect. Now in particular. It’s probably your mind turning to mush, but these final moments are stubborn, passing by their own whim. Even all the moments getting up to here, all of it seemed off, like some cosmic punk was playing with the hands of the king clock. Your thinking is getting a little strange now, but that’s to be expected. You are dying.

In a car chase for example. You’d never been in one, and now that you have, you certainly wouldn’t recommend it. You’re cruising along, faster than it seems your little city car was ever meant to go, your brain is scrambling to move at the same speed. The black SUV never gets any closer, like you two are stuck, traveling in lockstep, an invisible bar stabbing through traffic is holding you apart from one another. But all the other cars around you? They’re whipping past in  flashes of white and red; sure, you know it’s you whipping past them, but that’s not how it feels. Everything is happening quickly, almost too quickly to grasp. Then the one that will end the chase pulls out two cars ahead of you, and it all slows down at the instant you realize you’ve got nowhere to go.

That slow motion terror only lasts until you make first contact. Then suddenly you’re at warp speed again, and everything is crunching metal and things inside you breaking.

The trick with the hour is the unevenness. You remember the running joke you used to have with your wife, back when she was living with you, before you made all these connections to crime families. Longer even before those connection became you. “First we’ll be 25, then we’ll be 30, then 50, then we’ll be dead!” Kind of a morbid joke now that you take time to think about it. But that’s what an hour does.

That first half is nothing but infinite possibility; thinking of all the things you can do in an hour makes you dizzy. Or maybe that’s just whatever they stuck you with doing its work. Then, somewhere around the 35 minute mark, it’s like a switch flips. “Christ, 25 minutes left,” you say, “I can’t get anything done in 25 minutes.” You blink and it’s 10:45. Ten minutes, poof. One last blink, and it’s 10:57, the upside-down number glaring at you from an LCD that’s somehow remained power even through the flipping. Where does it go? And why has it chosen now to stop going there?

When you, stumbling home drunk at 10 o’clock at night, slipped the little trap they set up for you, put the fire escape to use for the first time in decades, it seemed like anything you did from that point forward would result in success. Now, with poison in your blood and endless moments to deliberate, you see how wrong you were.