Your heart is a clock; each beat a tick closer to midnight. But what happens at 12:01 when the world doesn’t stop and the clock’s run out but you keep hearing it beat and beat and beat until there’s just a melody? Just a melody floating in space, no time to guide it, no heart to keep it, no body to dance with it? What happens when you’ve perished but are timeless, half life over and radioactive all at once?

I’m sitting on a shelf with an old expiration date and yet buyers are still looking, still considering. I could go. I could move today, right now, this second, with this breath. But I am not now ripe, yet ancient and withering. Youngest of them all, older than the rest. I am the moment between waves, when the water flees the shore and the sand and shells believe they are dry and safe, but I know, I know, the wave is coming, much stronger, but no one believes me because I am too young to know, too young to have seen the previous waves. And yet I know. Because I am eternal. Midnight passed for me; It’s 12:01 and the stars are still shining and I’m waiting for dawn, even when no one else believes in dawn anymore.

There is a body beyond the door next to me. He listens at the door, he peers from the dark, and he watches and he learns. He is the buyer considering. I am the expired ******* that has no brethren to follow, yet will never mold. I am always viable, a cockroach among mammals. I am different. This does not make me valuable. This makes me dangerous, this makes me another rat in the race, because the paw prints next to me also belong to a different rat, but he is not dangerous. I am dangerous. I am eternity in a cell, screaming with insanity because I know, I know, there is a melody floating in space without any time and I hear beating, beating, beating all around even after the clock has stopped and it’s 12:01 and midnight was supposed to be the end but I found the back cover of the book and kept walking.

Your heart is a clock. Mine is a time bomb.