We peeled back the faces of clocks to find the gears were still like the evening, and time crept in so quaintly through our pores like a southern gentleman joining us for dinner. Sporting a shabby suit stitched together from the sheets of our youth and some questionable fabric that lay in our futures, he approached us with a sneer hung upon his obsidian face. He was well versed in the ancient rhetoric of fear and regret. A musician of sorts, he plucked at our veins with fingers that were twisted and stiff like branches of decaying oak. He rattled our bones in time with the clock, the pendulum, of which, still rocked steadily too and fro despite its stationary innards. The sound swelled within us, pounding against the eardrums as to drown out the quiet of the world beyond ourselves. In the next measures the scenes of existence, which we had strung together and thrown upon the screen, panned out, leaving nothing but we fools and time. He sat there strumming in the dark, as he certainly would have for ages, never aging and playing out his tunes until we all permanently became a work within his composition of sheet music. Surely we would be the songs that history would never touch again, the scores and old hymns that fell so short of being timeless, and sat superior a row of white keys, anxious to be played. We sat listening to the soundtrack of ourselves passing, the maestro -our old friend time- never tiring. And we would have remained, had it not been for the arrival of our next guest. He was a stranger, well, rather someone we had not met before, for he was not particularly strange. He came to each of us differently, so i cannot convey his features in a sentence, nor a thousand words, nor a volume of works, but he was beautiful. From his lips resonated such a sweet sound that, for a few moments , stifled the discord. We seized this small window and made for the mirrors, thanking the visitor in our haste. We gazed on ourselves within the deep pools of self realization that lay before us for both a lifetime and only a moment. We peeled back our faces to find that the contours of our flesh were absent beneath. The lines fell around our feet, and we danced atop them like children, for, in truth, we were. We were young and old, fact and fiction. With eyes like glass, reflecting promise and fortune, we looked to our old friend time, whose tattered garments had fallen around him. In his place, was a rustic, wooden record player spitting out the same tune we listened to for ,what seemed, a century. We gave the noise an audience, and it rested softly now on our ears.