Weekly Writing – February 24 2024

How long is a blink? We use it to describe practically no time at all, but if you add them up, day after day after day, you start to see just how much time we spend with our eyes closed.
How much precious time. It’s right there waiting for me, every time I close my eyes. Sleep is worst, obviously, but even a blink is another moment blurring past in that place I can see only behind my eyelids.
The same place – it always has been, since I was old enough to remember. A crossroads of white stone cut through plush, rippling grass in summer, buried by snow in winter. I’ve watched those stones grow older, the seasons come and go. Does it really only happen when my eyes are shut?
I can’t tell. I saw a woman murdered at that crossroads once, while lying in my own bed with my eyes squeezed shut. I thought afterwards that I should have opened them, maybe, in case that would stop it, but would it have just frozen the moment of that man wrestling her to the ground in time? Would her blood have hung in the air until I closed my eyes to witness it again?
Her body only seemed to rot while I was watching. She lay there for five days – her days, not mine – before someone else finally came by. It’s not a busy crossroads; I was so afraid they wouldn’t bother to bury her.
But they did, and now the slat they broke from a crate on their cart to make a grave marker gets older and older, too. Bleached in the sun, but only, maybe, when I’m watching.
How am I supposed to tell? Is it worse if I watch, making time go by in a world where something like that could happen? Or if I try to keep my eyes open as long as possible, freezing time so that nothing good or terrible can happen there at all?