There’s a clock in the bathroom.

It’s still running, but it is not functioning. What I mean is that it is stuck at 10:42. Stuck, but it isn’t stopped. The second hand twitches in time and it never quite reaches the next second. It has been going on like this for months. At first it ran but it would not keep time, it would lose a minute here, an hour there. Finally it just wanted to take one more step…and that’s where it remains.

Maybe it’s a flaw in workmanship. Maybe being in the humidity of the shower room, it’s just a product of its environment. I don’t know. But I’ve been watching all this and somehow I know that if I took it down off the wall, maybe just jolted it a little bit, it would resume its course and function again. Maybe I would need to find a screwdriver and open it up, get inside it and see about fixing what is wrong in there. But I don’t. I find such identification with this clock. We are the same. It keeps trying to get to the next step, but day after day after day it just can’t quite make it. It struggles on with it’s problems, no one noticing or helping, with no real option of helping itself…but it keeps trying because that’s all it knows how to do. It just keeps getting no where.

I stepped out of the shower last night and found myself just staring at this clock as it worked to reach the future. I don’t know how much time went by but I was overcome with the sense that when that clock stopped, when its batteries finally gave out and its gears were stripped, when it couldn’t keep trying, it would be the same for me.

And there would be a quiet sigh shared with a clock.