12pm. Time is still, and just as the day begins, the anxiety seems to creep into my psyche. I don’t understand why, but my eyes are suddenly attached to the clock, watching every passing second go by in that dreadful time machine. The seconds hand is ticking away, life passing me by, and all I can do is stare at that hand on that clock mocking me. My best friend is standing beside me. She just got her phone taken away from our fifth grade teacher, but all I can do is stare at that clock across the room. To my friends this was a fun Wednesday afternoon at school full of board games and empty journals. But this could easily be labeled as the worst Wednesday of my life, full of emptiness and countless of journals with pages based on a twelve year old girl, a girl I once was, pouring my heart out.
Seconds, minutes, hours go by. Before I could even prepare myself its 3:05. My mother isn’t there to pick me up, but a family friend. The car ride: silent, awkward, full of still energy. My friend is sent up to her room, and I didn’t understand why. I thought maybe it was my fault for playing too rough, but then I understood. I understood the stares and the silence. I finally understood the stillness in the air, and the endless glances at the clock. At last, I understood why my heart had sunk in my chest when time stood still at 12pm. I understood why even though my mind was detached from agendas for so long before, my heart had become one with time in that moment. But I laughed, denying how well I understood being only 12 years old.
Five minutes later. The door opens and I see a mother. My mother, I suppose, but the light had been drained from her eyes, and her stare was dead. My mother, who learned to live for others, died along with her father at 12pm. Her soul was as attached to her father as my heart was to that dreadful clock on that Wednesday afternoon, and just as my heart sunk, her soul sunk into the depths of the earth alongside my grandfather, a man I once knew. A man who stopped my world at 12pm.