In the course of 15 minutes, you'd like to tell the world your story.
There's nothing arbitrary about these 15 minutes. They're all you have until you have to move on to a new life. Like the 15 minutes in a cab on the way to your lawyer's office, where you will sign the divorce papers your wife wants you to sign three months after confessing to you the affair she's carried on with a college TA, met long before your courtship began.
It's a pity, though, that these are the only 15 minutes you have, because these are my 15 minutes, not yours. In fact, those 3 minutes that just passed? They were my minutes. As well as the one I just spent in silence. In the remaining 11 minutes I will give the world a piece of myself. You sit here and languish.
I have memories that are disembodied. Lives lived long, long ago. The feeling of calves pulling tendons pulling ankles lifting soles from foam. Foam lifting from cement. Ribs and arms encased in thin layers of cotton, too cool for the early spring weather, eyes tilted up, neck craning. It's a memory I relive too often. A memory that reminds me of distance.
7 minutes. A confession: 7 and 5 is my favourite combination of numbers. 5, a precious increment, a tenuous age, an incising number of letters. Enough to encase a life, to convey a lifetime's sentiment. An infinite sort of number. And 7, of little consequence. But intriguing for its oddity, for its excessiveness. And together, so worthless. Such a trope. So overdone. A number I've little taste for.
I've got less and less time on my side, but still an ample supply. The trouble with time is that you may never know it's there, that there are vast seas of it ahead of you, and yet you will waste it like copper or water, left running, tossed carelessly into a city bin at the corner on your way to school. 2 minutes left.
This is not what I had intended it to be, but perhaps it will be, one day. In any case, the stakes are being set. A toe-dragged line in the gravel. A juice box and a cap in the grass. This is where I will make fortunes out of nothing. This is where I will begin again my life.
