tonight will not be a good night, no. nor will tomorrow night, nor the night after that, because I decided to stop judging time by how much sunlight there is on this side of the earth. when you think of it as just a part of the story- as in it’s just the setting, it’s just mood lighting, it’s no more important than the plot or if you were drinking out of a blue or red cup, it may reflect the central theme but is never the primary indication of said theme- who cares that it’s night? your characters might be a little tired and scared. if they are vampires, it is ok for them to go outside.

again, this is what I do when I think about these things: I drive past houses in the suburbs and wonder if the people inside them notice the delicate, perfect, running-down spin of the earth. at work, when people ask me what time it is, I take too long, because I try to sort out everything they could mean by this. when I park my car in crowded parking lots, when I turn the engine off, I watch the little green clock on the dashboard linger for a fraction of a second, sucking in the electric residue from the battery and spitting it out at me, and I think about how it’s off by three minutes, and if the metronome buried deep within my car also accounts for that hesitation and adds it to the three minutes which I think it knows about. I think about the other people in their airtight cars, and if their clocks procrastinate like mine does, and if they solve that problem of doubt with the same magical thinking I’m now growing used to.

in the fifth grade, I heard that the Westminster Palace clock was the most accurate in the world. this has haunted me since then. how does one prove a specific clock to tick more appropriately than another? you would have to time clock A’s ticking against clock B, and then compare B to C, and so on. a kind of clock gauntlet. if they’re all broken in the process, imagine the pretension that would vanish from our species. it seems natural to assign a word like time and a machine like a clock to measure how many things we can say and do to each other before running out of the necessary sunlight.

that’s what ought to happen, anyways. or the clocks can stay, but in a diminished capacity: those water clocks they used to time how long you could speak at your own trial back in antiquity, or pendulum clocks, except only to look at recreationally, or digital watches that have lost their waterproofing, been dropped into swimming pools and are now jumbles of sixes and eights running backwards.

back to time only being real if shared, though: then time means as much as the empty space in your car, or the empty spaces in parking lots. how crippling it is to think of all that air being carried back to a little boxy house, and then let go.