KomorebiThe sun is bleeding into the sky. This is what we do best: murdering the hours, willing the clock to thump out rhythm faster and faster until we get to the destination weve been running through time for. Eighteen minutes here on this bench, I have been pausing to scan the distance for someone perpetually late. We could be gripping stories if we can cut life into fragments and shine light only on the instances that represent turning points. Like how you step onto a stage, golden and brilliant, and soak in the applause as if looked at for once, or like how your arms stay a little too long around someone about to disappear into a crowd because finality calls for rituals. I remember the first book that kept me company into the night, the burn of the fireflies through a window as behind me people waltzed and broke apart, the shaky check mark on a box on a piece of paper that mattered too much. And yet for every memory that flares into permanence, the rest is thrown into oblivion. Life is mostly forgetting; life is waiting, sometimes in vain. Life approximated would be the vast yawning in-betweens that we lose track of day after dayafternoon light forming shifting patterns on the ground, bent back and cramped hand over endless reports, the phone call home that has become routine until it no longer is. Eighteen minutes gently lilting towards nineteen, and here I am, listening to the impish laughter of children pushing each other on rusty swings. The color of the sky continues to escape definition. A leaf lands on my shoulder after twenty-five feet of surrendering to gravity, and I brush it off. Against the horizon, a pinprick: with every faraway footfall, these inconsequential seconds hesitate to die.