I have a habit. My habit is perfectly sane, utterly normal, as are all customs a man might have that pertain to lunch. Every day at noon, not 11:59, not 12:01, but directly on the dot of noon, I fold my jacket on my chair, put my overworked computer to sleep, and step out into the street with my lunchbox in my left hand.

Left. Left hand and a left turn and objects fuzzing out into left field as my perfectly sane habit begins to dissolve. At 12:05—what would be 12:05, if the clocks had not stopped—I sit on the edge of a fountain in the nearby square and watch the water as it goes still. And then, only then, after the currents are done eddying, do I unpack my tuna sandwich and look out at what has become of the world.

It is 12:08, and this is what I see:

A thin line of smoke trails through the open window of a food truck selling wood-fired pizzas to haze a couple arguing beneath the window, their faces like hastily sketched lines; a child running too close to a public art exhibit has fallen and scraped his knee, instead of crying he stares down at the torn skin and imagines, very bravely, that he is a soldier; a man seated on a telescoping stool plays the soprano saxophone, his eyes all squeezed up with what I can only assume is love; fat pigeons crowd around an old woman’s frayed skirts; dogs fight; red streetlights gleam like omens; a plane flying far above us has its landing gear stuck only partially retracted, the black specks of tires slung beneath its bole like rotten fruit; men watch women; women eye those same men carefully, and frozen as they are they look like rabbits in a field, standing still in case the stalking cat has not yet seen them.

By 12:42 I have finished my sandwich, crackers, and half a diet coke. The world has narrowed to a pair of slits. I think—I always think—that I have been forgotten. That all this world around me is a product of someone else’s imagination, some dreamer lingering in bed somewhere, a young woman, beautiful, with no imagination left over to finish sketching me, and that this is why it all seems so foreign. Why every little detail makes me feel so shocked.

By 12:50 I’ve settled on a person. The old woman with pigeons. She has kind eyes, and the birds seem to like her—birds have instincts, they know a thing or two.

I approach her at 12:51, and her edges all begin to shimmer. She wavers. Becomes indistinct. It’s like a breeze is passing through the world, fluttering her body and not just her skirts, until she is nothing more than a haze of linear motion.

I touch her face at 12:52 and watch as it erupts into discreet particles. Dissolves away from me. I touch the pigeons and they rupture too. Touch the couple arguing outside the food truck, the fighting dogs, the boy who dreams he is a soldier, and the whole goddamn world erupts.

At 12:55 I walk back to the office.

Put the jacket on. Button up my shirt.

At 1:00, not 12:59, not 1:01, I hit any key to continue, and my perfectly sane lunch hour comes to a sudden end.

Jack walks by, and Miriam. Alexei, Imran, and Kennedy, and none of us say a word.

And I wonder for the thousandth time if any of this shit can possibly be real.

r/TurningtoWords