If We Could Stop Time

By Jacob James Grigware

We would meet every night after a bullshit day's work. We would laugh at the fact that we don’t have to sleep. Don’t have to eat. Don’t have to get ready for tomorrow's bullshit. At the start, we would spend just a few hours apart from the world. Just a few extra hours to spend together, without the toil. It would be the thing pushing us through the day. Tonight, we’ll think, we get to stop and relax. We won’t have to fight. Then a thought would walk across our minds: have we fought enough? 

      Days would pass in our timeless love, and one of us would ask: Are you ready to go back yet? And the answer would always be no. But our escape from life would eat us up. Escape after escape, night after night, our minds would grow older than our bodies. The bullshit our coworkers say wouldn’t even register anymore. We are time gods. 

       Our escapes would mostly consist of sex. But then we’d realize we can do anything. We’d take weekend trips through the still world, witnessing the captured moments of those around us. Then we’d say, fuck it, let’s take a week off. Then a month. The years would start to add up. We’d ignore the comically large purple elephant in the room most of the time. But every once in a while, on a cliff's edge with our legs swinging, or looking up at the stars with our legs intertwined, we’d lock eyes and think: what the fuck are we doing? Is living so bad we have to escape it?

      We’d vow to keep living, to keep our escapes limited. Only living means something different. We would quit our jobs, travel, and make moments for real. We would be homeless for a while, but that’s okay. The people we meet would share and become our friends. Our escapes would mean something different as well. We’d start reading in our escapes. Working out when we missed the chance during the day. We’d pick up hobbies, skills, and we would hone them. Pretty soon we’d be the smartest people in the room, the funniest, the most skillful, the most mature. We’d make inside jokes around our friends, and everyone would be ignorant of our timeless love, our timeless lives. 

      For a while, we’d be satisfied. We would live without escape. Then we’d find a purpose bigger than ourselves. Our escapes would turn into work. In our opportunity, we would develop sciences, theories, and medicines. We would change the world. We would procure peace, we would send ships into space, we would lead humans into the universe. We would grow famous. Our names would be known. We would find ourselves too distracted to even think of stopping time. Our bodies would finally start to catch up with our minds, and we would grow old. We would make tea, rock in our rocking chairs, and look at the world we built. 

       We would escape for old times' sake. Love and laugh and relax without the worry of our creeping fate. Then we’d decide we were satisfied. We would vow to never escape again. And then we would die. 

By Jacob James Grigware