Drip

There’s a special hour in the dying of each day, when the sun pauses in its saundering stride to the horizon, and turns around to look back on the world it’s leaving, as if to promise its return. That’s the quietly magic moment where the trees are framed in gold and the clouds break into their last song as notes of color streak the sky before the impending night. It’s in that hour, that moment of sunset, that instant when the day is done but not finished, that time freezes. The steady ticking, though sometimes a trickle and sometimes a roaring rush, is in that moment, completely in your hands. You can hold your breath, and with every bit that leaks out, feel a drop go by. But the plasticity of time is not a uniform layer. It’s sometimes thick and heavy, like winter wool on the whitest of days. Other times, it’s as light as summer dew and seems to disappear before your eyes. Those who are old are blanketed with time, carrying the weight of their world on their bent backs and heavy hearts, the wrinkles of age filled with their memories of love and loss. The infants, on the other hand, fight time with all their strength. They flail and kick their legs and scream their pink faces, but in the end find themselves tempered by its swaddling. They grow up under the weight of all these layers pressing down, grounding them to a world they were not always bound, what we call reality. Time is measured by the ticking of clocks and the slow pulses of waves, but it is not kept by these contraptions and devices. They simply mark its passing. No, time is only kept by us, those who hold our breaths at the close of each day, and feel the drip. Drip. Drip.