25 o’clock

I was cycling toward the office in a state of absolute exhaustion. Tired, I had never felt so tired. The road like an endless tape, and just the soundless juggernauts alongside me, as though an entire country, an entire mode of being were being pulled to pieces and transported somewhere else by road. And there, at the tip of my left foot, the pedal turning effortlessly with the end of a chrome bolt catching the light, so it was as if a small star were chiming away the seconds in an arc.

As I drew closer, it became harder and harder to stay awake. Now I was looking at the petrol station far past the office, at the other end of the road, and, in between, I realised that, like a series of muffled thuds mostly underwater, I had intermittently ceased to exist; it was impossible to say for how long.

So tired that, even when I awoke now, I could not believe it were possible to feel so tired, and I held up my watch against the window where it continued to declare it was 25 o’clock, no matter how much I slapped myself and squinted at it. Until, finally, even reality grew too weary to uphold itself; it slipped away, reassuming its default form, the form that encompasses it without effort, the form in which it curls up to go to sleep itself. And where the watch too had slid down the pane, as though in the grasp of different fingers, it was no longer 25 o’clock, and none of us had been cycling, not this time; it was just part of a morning, somewhere.