He lay sprawled across his lecture hall’s carpet and imagined the clock, white as a piano, black as a piano, bloated with all the hours she’d ever eaten, wiping a second hand across her maw, mired with minute shavings, coated permanently in a layer of missed red deadlines like lipstick. She’s absolutely pregnant with meaning, his metaphor, for all the gestating ideas that spend hours dissolving and regrowing in all sorts of academic push-pin heads, they live inside her, taking up Time. He wonders what it takes to have your work leave a stretch mark, wavering and staticky, on the greedy abdomen of eternity. He’d certainly never seen one come from his glassy-eyed class.
He had assumed at first glance for her to be an unconditional glutton, why else assume less than an hourglass figure? But upon checking his watch, a stout yet slim, mustachioed fellow with the personal camaraderie of an uncle passed down second hand, he knew it to be false. She was merely an unfortunate sponge, saturated in days only somewhat willingly forked over. She ate their time like the institution ate their money, and the discovery of an uncaring world ate away at their optimism, ate away at their souls, all while the college students ate nothing at all. It was a job, no more, no less, and in that, he found similarity.
To fall in love you need three things:
1. That similarity, a sense of sameness, any glue that could piece together two or more radically different ideas, the molecular equivalent to bonding chemically in a dark abyss, endless and tumbling, being sewn together to make sweatpants.
2. At least one of you needs a physical form. I don’t make the rules, that’s just how they work.
3. Most of all, Love takes Time.
And she did!
Oh my god, she did!
He bolts upright from the classroom floor to find there is hardwood now instead of emerald carpet. His legs are shorter than they’d used to be, clad in long khaki shorts that show shriveled monkey limbs from the knees down. No. No, no, no! His hands are shriveled like the prunes he’d so often associated with old age, thick white hairs curling off the backs of them, follicular steam. Where had she gone? The clock on the wall has been replaced with a trim, digital bitch, glaring at him through cyberpunk sunglasses. He runs to a bathroom mirror only to find thick Einstein glasses and just the memory of hair. His voice catches like gravel seeds in a throat that no longer feels like his own. Where had the Time gone? Frantic, he checks his watch, the jovial man who hasn’t aged a day but now sits immobile, fishing seconds from folds of hourly fat, mustache still trimmed and neat. Now he rushes out of the bathroom, pained at how frail of a body he possesses, how shaky his fingers feel, and how awfully, awfully skinny he’d become.
Was that what she did to him? Was that what Time did to everyone? He clutches his chest in romantic longing and arterial pain, sunken to now arthritic knees. Was that all she did? Sap everyone’s life away until the idea of baby chub is laughable for them as her inflation remains unfettered? Until a human life is reduced to but a wisp of a wisp, emaciated and clinging only to this world by a merciful gravity? Time takes your body, she takes your ideas, she consumes everything in you and to what end? To become the behemoth blimp he saw before him now? Oh, lord approaching! Her more than ample bosom, an infinite expanse of plump hours, her pale torso covering endless continents, infinite time zones, why it’s enough for anyone to get lost in, he could see it now. His knees give out, same as his heart, and eternity eats at his vision until all he can see is white as a piano, then black as a piano.