"Have
you slept with him?
Yes.
Was it good?
I mean, is it better than...
I don't
wanna talk about it with you. I've gotta go. Sorry."
I tried to figure out what went
wrong. Why did we break up? It's funny, but when I think back
now the reason seems so small. One day she's with me, and she's
saying "I love you" and the next week she's with someone
else. Probably saying the same thing. So did she really love
me? What is love anyway? And is it really that fleeting?
To think
about her now with someone else, it felt like all the oxygen had been sucked
from the room. After my breakup with her, I just couldn't fall asleep anymore.
The more I tried to sleep, the less tired I felt. I was wide awake. I
tried everything. I'd just become immune to sleep. I suddenly found I had
eight extra hours. My life had been extended by a third. I wanted time to pass
quickly, but instead I was forced to witness the passing of every second of
every hour. I wanted the hurt I felt to go away. But in some cruel trick
of events, I now had even more time on my hands. More time to think
about her. I could feel a faint shift in a faraway place. A current of
unknown consequences was on its way moving towards me like an unstoppable wave
of fate.
My breakup had left me with a sense that time
had become unhinged. I drifted between imagination and reality, between past
and present with increasing ease. I feel the bolts of time slowly coming away
from the breakup. Time manipulation is not a precise science. Like any art,
it's personal to the individual. So what is the art in making my days go so
fast? I imagine the opposite. That time is frozen. I imagine the
remote control for life has been paused.
Within this frozen world, I'm able to walk
freely and unnoticed. Nobody would even know that time had stopped. And when it
started back up again, the invisible join would be seamless except for a slight
shudder. Not unlike the feeling of somebody walking over your grave.
That moment when you see someone walking down
the street who is so beautiful you just can't help but stare... Well, imagine
as I do, that with the world on pause it becomes very easy to understand the
concept of beauty. To have it frozen in front of
you. Captured. Unaware.
