Buckeye

by Patrick Ryan

Therein, she thought, lies the unbearable solitude of a lie: you’re alone when you tell it, alone when you live it, alone when you try to dismantle it.

and reminded him that those two words, I’m sorry, were very easy to say and literally changed nothing.

What to do, in the witching hours. What to do.

If you believed in God but didn’t go to church, and only prayed on an as-needed basis, you lived with your fingers crossed that your life was stacking up to make some sort of sense, and that it was preparing you for what was to come.

What is it about time that confounds us? We spend it. We save it. We while it away. We waste it. We kill it. We complain about not having enough of it, or about having too much of it on our hands. We regret what we’ve done with it. We give it away. We want it back. We say “time and again” when something is bothering us and “it’s time” when something is supposed to end.