Time and the Spark I Took Back

It’s late, the kind of late that makes your apartment feel like it’s holding its breath.

Your phone is face-up on the table like a little altar—black glass, silent, waiting to be lit.

Time is already there when you look up.

Not as a clock. Not as a deadline.

More like a presence in the corner of the room—the way a storm sits on the horizon without moving.

He’s calm. He always is. Camel brown overcoat draped over the chair, blue eyes timeless matching his auburn hair. The watch with number and no hands still on his wrist.

“You cleared your night,” Time says, softly, like he’s reading the air. “You made it simple.”

“I thought it was real,” you say. Your voice comes out smaller than you meant it to. “He sounded excited. He sounded… real.”

Time tilts his head, listening the way someone listens to a song they’ve heard before but still can’t stop feeling.

“And then?”

“Then his replies started getting smaller.” You swallow. “And I kept checking my phone.”

Time doesn’t laugh. He doesn’t correct you. He just watches the phone the way you do—like it’s a door that might open.

“And then they stopped,” you add, quieter. “Like it was my fault.”

Time steps closer. Not to the phone. To you.

“That’s the part you always do,” he says. “You take the silence and you put it on your own shoulders. You call it your weight.”

You look down at your hands—empty, open, like you were expecting to receive something.

You look up at time questioning, “I wasn’t asking for forever,” you say. “Just… one honest line.”

Time nods, like that matters. Like it counts.

“It does,” he says. “Honesty is small, but it’s not cheap.”

You let out a breath you didn’t know you’d been holding.

“He went quiet,” you say, and the words taste like cold water. “Like I meant nothing.”

Time’s eyes flick to the window. Outside, the streetlight hums. A cab passes. The city keeps being the city.

“Quiet,” Time repeats. “The oldest method.”

“It felt like our spark just faded out,” you say. “Like someone pinched it between two fingers and decided it wasn’t worth the light.”

Time’s expression softens—not pity, exactly. Something steadier.

“Fading,” he says, “is different than ending. Fading is what happens when someone leaves without touching the doorknob.”

Your phone stays dark. You hate how much you want it to change.

“So what am I supposed to do?” you ask. “Just sit here?”

Time looks at you the way tide looks at shore—patient, inevitable.

“No,” he says. “Not sit. Not chase. Not beg.”

You flinch, because he’s saying the things you were already trying not to think.

“You were ready to turn your heart into a question,” Time continues. “To ask again. To ask softer. To ask smaller, so your wanting wouldn’t scare him off.”

Your throat tightens.

“And if you wanted to be here… you would,” you whisper, like it’s a prayer you don’t fully believe yet.

Time nods once.

“That line hurts,” he says. “Because it’s clean. Because it leaves you no room to bargain with the story.”

You stare at the phone, then away from it—like you’re learning how to stop touching a bruise.

“But I’m still left alone,” you say. “That’s the part I can’t fix.”

Time steps closer and, for a moment, the room feels warmer. Not happy. Just… held.

“Being alone is a fact,” he says. “Being abandoned is a story. Don’t write it in ink when it was written in smoke.”

You blink hard.

“So what do I do with this night?” you ask.

Time gestures gently, as if opening a curtain.

“Give it back to yourself,” he says. “Turn the room from a waiting place into a living place. Eat. Shower. Music. A small kindness. Something that tells your body it isn’t being punished.”

You exhale.

Outside, a siren passes. It fades. The city keeps moving.

Time looks at your phone one last time.

“Silence,” he says, “will always try to sound like your fault. Don’t let it borrow your voice.”

You pick up the phone. Not to check it—just to move it.

You set it face-down.

And in that small motion, the night changes shape.

Time doesn’t disappear. He never does.

He just sits with you while the spark you thought you lost slowly finds its way back—

not in someone else’s hands,

but in your own.