It doesn't take that long for me to climb three steps, two actually because I always triumphantly skip one, before my foot slips on a concrete surface of air and I realise I'm dead asleep and far away in a dream I won't really care to remember when I'm up later, which won't be that far either.
It takes me exactly five seconds to end a phone call.
And the sandwich toaster's set to have my panini ready after about sixty seconds of inexistent waiting.
But I really don't know how long I spend on pulling myself back together. Never kept track.
I do, however, know that I try too hard to put, whatever it is that needs to be put on hold, on hold.
I know that I would waste my days in bed because that's where I feel safest, and leave the parts where I read to nights because I get scared.
And if I don't, I think. Which is scarier.
Days are pretty slow and nights are pretty long when someone who should be there, isn't.
And they're even slower and longer when it hits you that they'll never be.
If a book holds a hundred pages waiting for you to read, they will be read and get done with. In a matter of two weeks.
But something you once told me was scribbled on a piece of paper during some long boring class, it's somewhere in my room now, and I will read it again, and again, and again. And always.
I'm reading it right now.
And one far day, I'll pass it on for someone else to write down on their own piece of paper.
A flight to Spain takes four hours to get there.
Which is enough for me to reconsider a few major life-changing decisions: promising myself I'll be a better person, doing something wild with my hair, whatever. Things I won't do because those four hours of a flight won't last enough for me to keep this striking firmness of purpose forever.
And speaking of forever, if any of us has that long of it anyway, it takes a person forever minus the last day, to figure things out and wish they'd done them differently.
Because if we could just grasp the fact that at a certain point things just stop being things, in our lives at least, we would all have figured things out a whole lot earlier than we usually do.
But we don't.
And I wish I'd known that.
I would've done everything some other way.
And spared a few lingering forevers.
