For Edson

Yesterday’s clock stopped at precisely 3:15. It said nothing of its resignation. No long sighs and goodbyes. It simply gave up its post and refused to tick even one more tock. Not one. Instead, it stood there and imagined life as a surfboard.

Cascading through azure waters, feeling nothing but the slim thong of a rider. No longer worried about chiming and turning hands one second at a time. No brassy mechanisms, its tall cherry design re-purposed to glide and surrender to tide and rhythm – the sea’s rhythm.

No second-chance cadence. Instead, time, which plays hopscotch sometimes; sometimes jumping, sometimes waiting for the right moment to float from seven to eleven with barely a care, used this thought as pretense. The big wooden burden ascended, and I was both elated and late.

The choice to stop and change direction at just the right moment is both celebrated and inconvenient for those to whom you matter. But that is not your matter; the matter is things and thongs and everything that makes time and the sea and a surfboard the same thing.

That is to say that the matter is moot. There is nothing the matter with change. It is the only constant. After all, even after the clock stops ticking and fails to chime, there is the matter of a thing disengaging, floating over to its next purpose. A pause and then a leap, from one to eleven, in a great game of time and hopscotch.

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