By a local magazine
Here’s how I think it happened; I travelled in time. I had slipped a second behind everything else, my movements had been made before I made them, I was reliving someone else’s life. I don’t know when I came to realise I had travelled in time, but I do know where it happened; I was in the toilet and drunk, which was less than ideal.
The first clue came in the bathroom mirror, I caught sight of myself blinking. It’s a strange thing to see one’s own eyes closed in situ. Then I saw my hand reach down and undo my fly a second before I did, creating a blur of unzipping. I thought it must be the light, and oh my gosh I shouldn’t have drunk this much again and who is that looking back at me? In the mirror, who is it? They move with me but not like me. Their hair is receding. Their shoulders are clenched up behind their neck, their shoulders are too broad. They look so scared. I look so scared? Is it? could it possibly be me?
How could I have slipped out of time like this and never noticed? Maybe I did notice before, but that was someone else entirely. Maybe the mirror was wrong.
I’ve met other people like me, people that have travelled in time and found themselves caught a second behind someone else’s life. Some people have lived their whole lives knowing, others, like me, realise. Sometimes we talk about how uncomfortable it is, following someone else’s life. Sometimes we talk about the other moments, when we eclipse the present, when we become contemporary, the second when we feel well timed, uncomplicated, euphoria.
When do you feel it?
Is it in the hinge of your elbow, as your head rests on your partner’s chest, rising and falling to the cadence of their breath? In the bleached denim of a borrowed pair of dungarees that used to belong to your housemate? In walking through one door instead of another? In the right bathroom mirror?
Anyway, the bathroom was nice, the cubicles were clean, almost to a fault—the smell of cleaning chemicals was at times overwhelming. There were 2 urinals and 3 bathroom stalls which were pretty spacious. The taps had a pleasingly high water pressure. The hand drier was powerful but very noisy. The lighting was divine. 7/10