Escape from time

X and I are both hopeless at maps, we don’t know Libya from Israel. Geography never interested us. Our friends at our two different schools used to tease us about our inabilities to find our ways around our separate cities. Get some life skills! they told me, I don’t know what X’s friends told him. Just tell us where we need to go, we both said, I don’t care how. We never understood road or tube maps. Yet we were both always on time, we agree, we were both always scrupulous about time. Because time was a different matter, time demanded great anxiety and scrupulousness no matter where you were. We learned early on that time wasn’t ours, that time was something that was demanded of us, that clocks were things that ticked ominously, echoing in the pits of our stomachs. But somewhere inside ourselves we both began to feel the same way about time as we did about the places we happened to be: that time wasn’t theirs anymore than it was ours. It took a long time for this thought to enter our consciousness, and it was around then that we met. And so eventually our common aim, when we’d known each other for a while, became to escape from time, theirs and ours, because theirs had become ours.