I was forced to sit upon a bench before a marbled statue in an art museum. Through patience and boredom, I traced over the figure before me. It was a woman. Her skin appeared so smooth, and her existence so intentional. She was draped with sheer fabric. How one carves sheer fabric from marble stone, I would never know. She looked so beautiful and at peace. Was I at peace? I mentally scanned over myself. I felt the nervous pumping of my heart and heard the carbonic shuffling of the toast I had eaten prior. I glanced, but not too obviously, at my fingers and the hands they were attached to. I could see the tangled roots of blue crawl between each other and the millions of cross hatched lines overlaying. I looked back up at the marble person. She had no pumping or shuffling. No crawling or cross hatching. She was silken and at rest. I tried to mimic her. I held in my place. Unmoving, unthinking, just being. But the more I tried, the worse I heard my heart and the worse I felt my stomach. I heard my thoughts and my chest rise and fall. I was cursed. I wanted to be like the woman. But my homeostatic existence forced me to continue. I held my mind as I stared at the statue with envy. What an existence to live. Pure, uninterrupted stasis. True stasis. She only moved when moved by others. And even then, she was at rest within herself. No knowledge outside of her oneness. I looked inward again. I was forced to be here. I was forced to be brought here and forced to be taken away from here someday. No one even thought to ask me about the matter. Time is so limited. And here I was. Forced to be here and forced to be here, looking at this woman with more than I could ever have. She was beautiful, spending everyday within a single place being praised by liberal art students and school children who pass through this atrium, even though she did not exist for them. She existed for herself. She stayed within herself, her own scope. Unbound by time or place in her mind. Yet, we all were lucky enough to have witnessed her within her unboundaries. After brushing over her several thousand times, I noticed a chip within her pedestal. I became silently aggravated at the prospect of some lazy dolt who was given the honor of moving her to only do so uncarefully, or an ungrateful adolescent bored amongst the halls of everlasting pieces of geniuses’ minds. But that was just it. They weren’t everlasting. Not really. Not even she, as her perfection captivated for millenia. For the first time, I felt I was her, and she was me. As she has been idolized for her beauty, such as I for the people who loved me. She had a history, as did I. We both have texture and features of difference, but we were to lie in the same bed someday. I would fall asleep much sooner than she, but all things must lay to rest. Even if she spent her entire worldly being in protection, she would still be brought to a close with the setting of the Universe. Two immaculate sisters saying farewell, both so vastly different yet frustratingly the same. Though for both, the daughter of mass and the daughter of time did not cross each other’s paths. They merely felt one another through the beings within and around them that occupy the other. Mass felt time around her, as time felt mass within her. And thus, were one, with no knowledge of the other. I took the first breath I had acknowledged since I first sat on this bench. My eyes attempted to adjust to farther focal points of the rest of the building once I finally pried my gaze from the woman. So many other beautiful beings existed in this singular space that I had no idea about until now. I wanted to spend my time with them, before they had no more time to spend with me. A woman came out of the door to my left. She asked me if I was here to interview for the security guard position. I nodded. She invited me to follow her into the room, and I did just that.
