Free For All Friday: Time Flies

The clock caught my attention yesterday. It was a few minutes before 4. I had been working since early on.

Suddenly, I heard a frantic ticking noise. An old building, I thought the pipes may simply have been acting up. Then I looked around. The clock on the wall spun wildly. I don't know how many revolutions it made, but it transfixed me from the moment I saw the hour hand running a race with the second hand and winning. My focus lapsed as the minute hand lapped the second hand several times and brought the hours with it. It spun and spun, wound around several times with incessant ticking. For a moment, I thought a spectre had eyes on me. I wondered if it had a time sensitive message it wanted me to decode.

Then, my poetry senses ticked on, and I thought that the spinning clock screamed sign language with its hands that time is short; that we never really have any control over how fast hands will move. That sometimes, a few moments can feel like hours, and conversely, hours can pass by in a matter of moments.

I then began to wonder if some kind of grave hands had reached out to tell me that my time was going by too quickly. That if only I'd let go of the past, I could focus on the new to know the now. That if only I could hold the hands of the clock like I held the hands of girlfriends past, maybe it wouldn't feel like running away so fast.

Then I remembered that I'm single, and I had exes for reasons which usually involved me letting go all too easily. So perhaps the hands were signing to not let go so simply. To hold on to what I could and turn nevers into nows, thrust my hands into the future, grab dreams, and let them pull me forward into a time I can't yet conceive.

I would have pleaded with the clock to let me know which interpretation was truth, but I never knew. Sometimes hands are quicker than eyes, and so when the hands finally stopped their magic show, I sat stumped in place. I brushed the rings underneath my eyes and felt old, tired, as though I had a story to tell.

I cracked the knuckles on my worn hands and set my fingertips to work.
I looked at the clock.
The clock looked back.