Tick tock.

The train pulls into to the station. People dance off and people dance off in an endless kind of intercourse. The man muses as the trains makes it slow motion getaway carrying his son off into the smog-clouded sunset. As he walks home the smog twilight turns to cold drizzly streetlight lit night. Somehow the streetlights never seem to do more than emphasize the darkness.

The door closes, and locks his various locks, bolts the various bolts, and wonders what do with himself as he faces his small one room apartment. Gazing at the drab walls and what little shabby furniture he owns, he wonders how his home became such a joyless place. He ponders if there is any chance of falling asleep tonight and sighs with the realization that this night, like the previous, holds no rest for him. No solace…

Lying on his couch he looks up into the darkness at the cracking paint on his ceiling and lets the sounds of life winding down for the night in his building wash over him. It’s the sound of people spilling sand through their fingers one day at a time. Specks of questioned significance that are lives flashing in slow motion like a firefly lighting up for eighty years and winding down into darkness again. But finally, silence comes and with it comes a deeper shade of solitude.

He counts the rhythmic beats of his bedside clock and for every beat of his heart there’s a tick in the plastic clock echoed by a tock. The beats mingle, which is which? He wonders if they are somehow related, does the tick bring on the tock, do either of those make his heart beat, or are they both echoes of his heart? The mere possibility of this proves to be too much responsibility for the frail mechanisms of a wind up clock. The tock stops but the tick carries on its own, walking its own path in its time. The rhythm is random and as such fails to be rhythm. By sunrise there is only silence there to greet the awakening world.