Slipping by

He could have been reading the newspaper; I could have been changing the station on the radio. Instead, I glanced to my left while paused at a stoplight to catch him staring out the bus window. We saw each other at the same moment.

Does time stop? Yes, regularly, for seconds, sometimes years. It stops for individuals. The world continues by them, oblivious to the pause in a life. Time scoops you up, drags you back then hurls you forward. In the time it takes for a light to change, I was in his arms in the woods at sunset, by a hospital bed holding his hand, curled in his lap in the blue glow of a television, drunk, prostrate on his kitchen floor, handing my savings to a bail bondsman... then swirling in a vortex of water, choking, without air, until the passenger in the car was shaking me. "What happened? What happened?"

You know that love. It's time messing with you. You become encased in a bubble, it's just the two of you, nobody else understands what you have. You are each other. Nothing, nothing else matters. You become poisoned in that bubble, breathing each others' toxins, until one day, if you're lucky, you're expelled, thrown to the curb, bruised, battered and wondering where three years went.

I gasped, sucking oxygen in short shallow spurts, and with a lurch and a burst of exhaust, he was gone.