Time Freeze

   I keep coming back here. Back to where I tripped into traffic in my drunken stupor. Back to where I stumbled to my feet in enough time to see the truck hurtling towards me, too fast to stop. Back to where I screamed a final, desperate scream, crying out at the unfairness of it all as I prepared to meet my end. 

     Back to where I stopped time. 

     You might be thinking, neat, right? What timing, you might say. What amazing things I could do with an ability like that, you might wonder with excitement. And you’d be right.

     Except I can’t start it up again. 

     No matter how hard I try, I can’t get time to move. It’s all frozen exactly where I stopped it  four, no, five years ago now. Sorry, it’s hard to keep track of time when it doesn’t flow anymore. You’d think that wouldn’t be a big deal, but let me tell you, it’s killing me.

     When you’re going about your day, you lose track of how many times you do something as trivial as looking at a clock, checking your phone, trying to see what time it is. You measure out your life in the twenty four hour intervals you’re told you have, and you think nothing of it. For me, though, now, clocks don’t move. The phone screen doesn’t change. The sun doesn’t move from the setting position it was in when my life almost ended. 

     Not that it was much of a life, at first. I used to think that. No friends, no contact with my family, just work and eat and sleep, a slave to the corporate world where they chew you up and suck you dry and your only solace is at the bottom of the shot glass every weekend. I’d take my meager paycheck and go to the local dive bar and drink foul tasting liquor and listen to the same six songs on the busted old jukebox until I was too drunk to acknowledge either of them. That, of course, lead to my current predicament.

     Now that I look back at things, man, my life was a waste. Not because it was meant to be a waste, like so many people believe when they aren’t swimming in riches and fame and having their every wish fulfilled; no, my life was a waste because I wasted it. You never realize how important things are, trivial or not, until you don’t have them anymore. 

     The one thing you notice right away in a world that doesn’t move is the lack of noise. Total silence, in every sense of the word, save for whatever sounds I happen to make and then, even those disappear quickly into the hush. That might sound nice, given how loud the world usually is, and it was for a while, I won’t deny it. But silence, as it turns out, can be oppressive, particularly when it never ends. What I’d give right now to hear a song on the radio, the wind through the trees, the laughter of a good friend after a funny joke. But there’s nothing. Even the sound of my own voice could only cheer me up for a little while, and then even that went quiet. Why talk when nobody can listen? As I write this, I don’t think I’ve spoken a word in almost three years.

     You know what else I miss? Eating. As it turns out, for whatever reason, I don’t need to anymore. Probably because I wasn’t hungry when I was about to be killed. Why, then, am I not still drunk? Let me tell you, I wish I was, but I suppose the best answer is that when you’re about to become a hood ornament, you sober up really quickly in order to fully comprehend how screwed you are, and as a result, I was sober as a judge before I froze time. But I digress, where was I? Oh right, eating. 

     Do you know how many times you shove food into your mouth, chew it, and swallow without ever really tasting it? Let me advise you to stop that right now. Savor every bite, every flavor. Buy a really good steak dinner, with all the sides and really good wine, and just enjoy every bite. Appreciate that we’re alive and human and able to find joy in the simple things like the taste of your favorite dessert, or the mysterious quality in your mother’s cooking that separates it from anyone else’s, or the feel of cool lemonade running down your throat on a hot day. You really miss that stuff when you can’t experience it anymore. 

     The worst part of this, though, is the loneliness. Ever hear the saying, “Water, water everywhere but not a drop to drink?” Same thing. See, things didn’t fade or vanish when time stopped, I didn’t go into some magic dimension or pop through a wormhole or any such nonsense that we see on TV. Everything literally froze. The people on the street, the birds in the air, all of them exactly where they were five years ago. An ocean of people, and nobody to talk to. 

     I wasn’t exactly social, but that was by choice, and there was at least always the option to talk to someone. More than talking, I miss the random connections you make with other people, even when you aren’t trying. The guy at the end of the bar throwing back drinks as fast as you, that you make eye contact with long enough to acknowledge that you’re both having a crappy day. Or the kindly old lady who swears you look like her son and makes sure to drop off baked goods every so often to let you know someone was thinking of you. Little things like that get taken for granted so often, and staring at this sea of blank and empty faces, I miss them more than anything else. I wander around my motionless world, hoping one day to find something, someone to connect with, anything to ease my existence in this prison I somehow created for myself. And yet  somehow, for some reason, I always come back here, to where it all started. 

     So why am I writing all of this down now? Because I hold one more fleeting shred of hope that maybe, just maybe, someone will read this one day, when time finally starts moving again. Maybe that person will spread my message, which is simply put, don’t waste what you have. Take a walk in the warm sun, build a snowman, take that trip. Leave nothing to regret later and nothing to miss when it’s gone. Because you WILL miss it when it’s gone. Live such a full and meaningful life, even when it seems hopeless, so that when you finally leave this world, you don’t do it like me, full of remorse and bitterness. Live, and enjoy living. 

     As for me, I’ve exhausted my possibilities here. I’ve wandered the world, I’ve seen things I never would have in my normal life, and made the effort to appreciate them. But now I’ve done what I could, and now I’m tired. Now, I just want to sleep, to wake, to do anything, and so I come back here. Where it began. I look at the driver of the truck as I stand before it, and I forgive him. Not his fault I was a drunk idiot. I look at the faces of the people who would witness the accident, and I pray that this doesn’t scar them so badly they end up like me, and shattered and empty shell of a man. And as I take my place in front of the truck, I hope I am given a chance to change my life, to truly live before I die, and to encourage others to do the same. But for now, I’m going to sit here and close my eyes, and wait for what I truly think should have happened in the first place.

     I’m going to wait until my life starts again.