I sat on the edge of the bed, chewing a pencil, an empty piece of paper on my hand, waiting. Again, for sickening ideas. The room was still, I locked the doors, no one moved, I heard no rings or chatters, only the sound of my heartbeat and breathing. And the sound of the clock.

I stared at it. Tick, tock, tick, tock.

Tick.

It stopped.
I frowned.

Maybe it ran out of batteries. Maybe the clock was truly old that it just had to stop, its life ending. Maybe it was conscious of my staring, and it stopped to see how I would react. I twitched. It irritated me slightly. I didn't know why, I just felt that it was very irritating for the clock to stop.

As if it felt my annoyance, it started working again. Only after ten seconds, it stopped. It continued again. It stopped after five. It stopped after three. After two.

Beads of sweat started sliding from my neck, down to my throat. I didn't know what I was waiting for. I had a theory, but I didn't voice it out loud; I didn't even let the sentence finish in my head. Then it started working perfectly; after a minute, after two minutes, three minutes, five minutes... After the fifteenth minute it stopped again. A frown appears on my face.

My theory was, time has finally stopped.
Oh goodie! That would give me a lot of breaks. I can do anything in one day, or two, and wake up the next day to see it was still Sunday. Wake up the next morning to see it's still Sunday.

I can paint a thousand paintings, I can write as many stories as I want, I can eat and lose everything I ate and it would still be Sunday.

Sunday, bloody Sunday, I sang in my head.

Time will have to stop soon, and then we can have free reign. Of whatever we want, no deadlines at all. Nothing we have to worry about. Finish things with our own pace, rather than finishing them up with stress and worry, and the result too pathetic to see.

I twitched when the clock started working again, I could feel it smirking at me, reading my thoughts, and laughing at how silly I was. There's nothing wrong with thinking; everyone needs to think. Everyone has theories. Everyone has ideas. I eyed the clock with narrowed eyes. I heaved a sigh.

We're probably like the clock. We have our moments, and life seems to go on for us, because of survival, maybe, because of love, success -- each of them a momentum in our lives. Each of them's something we can't live without; a thirst to us. And we keep putting batteries on the clock to keep us going; because it's routine. And when the clock stops that's when we have our confused moments, depression seeps in through you, feeling you, caressing you.

Dragging you down.

But then you wave it away and continue on with life, putting on batteries to keep you going, filling up your heart with love, and you hope that your heart would continue: pump, pump, pump.

Just as the clock continues to; tick, tock, tick, tock.

But there will have to be a time that we can't replace that darn battery. There will be a time that it just has to run out, to die, and expire.
There will be a time that you'll have to quit running and start lying down to rest, expiring, yourself.
I'll be expiring, too. Like you. Like me. Like them.

And then the clock thinks, I wish I made myself useful ticking all the time, hanging on the wall/on the tops of desks/on someone's wrist.

And then we start reflecting what the clock says. I wish my life had been useful, too, to live with rights and a free conscience, no blood on my hands nor with the ones I loved, always running, walking, going left and right.

Time is everywhere. Only time can heal. You can only do things in time. Time will be your guide, your companion. You can only be successful in time. You can only be a mess in time. Tick, tock, tick, tock.

I've more time ahead of me, more tick tocks to go. Years more. More breaths to breathe. More beats to pump. I've time to make myself useful, to make someone happy, to guide someone, to comfort a friend, to make someone smile. Sure I might bump on a post and start chewing on tinfoil and candy wrappers and more what-whats, but I'll just have to snap out of it to keep me going.

I sighed as I lay down on the bed, yawning, sleepy. The clock wasn't moving.

I didn't want to get up and nudge it, or poke it. Prodding wouldn't help. I'll let it go on by itself, just like us.

Waking up an hour later (I checked the time from my phone) I saw that it was still a stand-still. I yawned and heaved my lazy ass off the bed; the clock's needing help. I stretched my arm upwards and got it off the hook on the wall. I left it on the shelf to hunt for batteries.