A woman stopped time in a convenience store
just to check if she still felt anything when she did it. One second the cashier was scanning gum with bored precision, the next he was frozen mid-motion, receipt halfway out of the printer, mouth slightly open as if the sentence he was about to say had been politely postponed. Outside, the street locked into stillness: cars stranded mid-lane, a plastic bag suspended like it was thinking about flight but hadn’t committed. At first, it worked the way she remembered it always working. “This is still mine,” she thought. She walked between the aisles slowly, listening to the absence of reaction. No footsteps answered her. No one looked up. The world didn’t argue back. That used to feel like freedom. Now it felt like being the only person in a room who still had to decide what mattered. She picked up a bottle of water and turned it in her hands. “I started doing this to prove I wasn’t small,” she thought. “Like if I could stop everything, I couldn’t be ignored by it.” She glanced at the frozen cashier. Young, tired, mid-life sentence paused without consent. She wondered if he’d ever have an opinion about this moment, or if she was the only one who would ever carry it. “That’s the part I don’t say out loud,” she thought. “It’s not control. It’s just silence that agrees with me.” She set the bottle down gently. At the door, she hesitated. “I keep waiting for it to feel like power,” she thought. “But it mostly just feels like I’m the only thing left that has to continue.” Then she stepped outside into the still world, and didn’t start it again right away.
No comments:
Post a Comment