I’m not sure what to say about this one. Sometimes characters show up in our peripheral. Sometimes we let them pass by like shadows. Sometimes they are too familiar more like ghostly reflections than shadows and we turn to look. Sometimes they tell us a story we didn’t know was in us. Sometimes…it’s scary…too close…even so, horrifically beautiful.

Seconds 

(formerly: The World Seems Too Long a Place to Live)


“I wish it were shorter,” she said. I looked up from my phone, standing behind her in the ticket line.

“It won’t take long,” I dismissed, going back to the news.

“It’s already too long,” she said. 

She stared through the people shuffling ahead of us with her glass blue eyes, stuck in the chain rope chute, before she startled towards the whispering red streaks of an approaching train, through a doorway, just beyond our queue. It looked like a candy cane twirling, fast and breathless.

The strange hunger of knowing filled her throat and she swallowed.

“I wanna go now,” she said. I took in a breath to ask what she meant. . .

Moments seem slow, sometimes. Like the glacial pace of my eyes following her dropped bag and her, silhouetted form in the sunlight, before she disappeared; in between the red streaks of a train that could not stop. 

But it was only seconds. One-one-thousand. Two-one-thousand. Three-one-thousand. 
Gone.