The first time it happened was in the middle of a basketball game. The second time was when you ran into your ex-boyfriend in the supermarket. The third time, that homeless man was asking you for change. Each time the process has been the same: Time seems to slow down, your body begins to freeze, and your mind becomes quick as lightning as you study the situation. You analyze and decide, and then the moment passes. Maybe you're just imagining things. Maybe it's all the caffeine you've been ingesting or the fact you've slept only 12 hours over the last four nights. Maybe it's just the adrenaline giving you a boost. Then it happens for a fourth time, and it becomes clear that time is actually stopping. You are making a blind turn around a corner when the truck in front of you skids into the other lane. The driver in an oncoming car honks and jams on his brakes while the car behind him veers wildly toward you. All at once everything freezes. Terrified, you assess the situation. You could yank the wheel hard and perhaps miss that oncoming car, but there's a truck behind you that you didn't see earlier. You finally decide on the optimal course of action: Quickly, you winch the steering wheel with all your might and shift into reverse, forcing the truck to speed backward while veering left away from the oncoming car. Then time starts again.
No one ever talks to you during these incidents. You don't know anyone else who has ever experienced them. You don't know what causes them, but when they happen to you, they always happen in the same spot. Not once has it happened somewhere else: It is always in the exact same clutch of traffic, always on a road that you recognize, always in an unfamiliar place. You've looked for patterns and you've tried to rationalize away the occurrences, but there are no patterns or coincidences involved. It's either that you are being extremely lucky or that there is some kind of connection between you and the wrongness of the world.
The events make you extremely uncomfortable because you're constantly surrounded by nothingness. Traffic never changes, weather never changes, and yet everything seems to ebb away while you stand there. It's a moment where you're somewhere, but you're not. Women never leave their houses. Men never leave their offices. There's no respite outside of a store, a store that remains the same even now when everything else around changed.
You've decided that you don't understand them. One thing you would like to change is how you make that decision.
The calendar month has ended. The newspaper has been thrown out. Somewhere in the daily shuffle you forgot that August 31st came and left without so much as a goodbye. Now a new one is here and soon you'll have forgotten it too.
You have just finished your master's degree in economics. There's a degree you earned, a company you interned for, books on economics you don't even touch anymore. The years have stacked up and the days are compressing. The strange moments are happening more frequently.
You're sitting in your living room in the middle of inexplicable traffic. A mass of frozen cars jerk and hiss at their dead stops. You're crouching on your floor, listening and waiting. You feel like a child who has been left at home all summer. You feel alone.
Time passes. Twenty minutes the traffic remains still without so much as a single movement. The stillness tickles your throat.
You're tired of waiting. You've almost been getting used to this. You've been stressing yourself by wondering when the moment will hit, when time will stop. But now you're done waiting. You're done. You get up, walk over to the window, and face the frozen traffic.
Then it happens. The world around you is stuck in time. You're shocked at how easy this is. You were so convinced that things would never stop again, and now here you stand. What a feeling. But why? Why did going out the door that night make the difference?
It then comes to you. It's not the closure of your degree, the whim of your internship, the old economics books you never use anymore. It's not the sudden realization of something you've been searching for all your life. Keep looking. Keep going. There's one specific thing. You need to see one particular thing. You close your eyes and start thinking. Keep thinking. Keep imagining. Keep analyzing. One single thing must be here, somewhere. Your thoughts are coming faster and faster as you search. The moment stretches on. The cars around you no longer look frozen from your new perspective. They look dead. But where's the thing you need to find? It must be here. Maybe you aren't thinking about it enough. Maybe you aren't looking hard enough.
Keep thinking. Keep going. There's something waiting, some small something that no one knows about. Keep looking. Clock your time. Search your brain. The longer it takes, the more you will pay. The moment won't stop. Keep searching. The cost must be high.
The moment is endless, for the cost always keeps going up.
The moment hits. Your mind is tired, dizzy as your eyes flicker open.