Alarms on loop, lukewarm coffees, and stuttering calendars: the city skipped the heart of its morning.
Don’t look for logic: it took a number and is still waiting its turn.
This morning, the clocks offered a dilemma: 8:59, 9:01, but nothing in between. The trams rolled in the conditional, the offices opened adverbially, and the baker pulled a batch stuck at “almost baked.” This article, a diligent witness to the improbable, admits it is recounting a crack in the ordinary with the earnestness of an origami manual: fold upon fold, until the duck becomes a swan (or the reverse; the paper hesitates).
Out in the streets, passersby tried to clear the missing minute the way you jump an invisible puddle. A morning runner declared, in a very assured tone: “I can confirm: I ran straight and arrived at not-yet, then at already, without passing through now.” The watch on the wrist, vexed, buzzed nonstop as if it were suddenly learning Morse.
At this point, I’m taking the floor in the first person because, frankly, who other than me (me = the article) can admit that I read myself aloud to give myself courage? I know how to do this: a catchy headline, a neatly coiffed standfirst, paragraphs that stay upright despite their untied laces. I also know you’re smirking: you don’t lose a minute the way you lose keys. Yet I’m describing its absence with an eye for detail that wouldn’t have looked out of place in a railway-station novel, right on the dot.
The denouement came at noon, which showed up in slippers, without apologizing. The city picked up its sentence midstream, the baker declared her batch “just golden enough,” and the trams returned to the present tense. As for me, I remain here, a small rectangle of paper aware of being incongruous, ready to assure you that everything above is rigorously unverifiable — but charmingly true in the exact space between 8:59 and 9:01, where reason, too, sometimes likes to miss its stop.
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