Confounding Time

My aunt gave me a watch when I graduated from college and I've worn it ever since. Five years later, I've added scratches and dings but it still marks the hour. The steel timepiece has a rotating dial encircling the face, clicking to and marking any one of sixty arbitrary moments in time. The dial only turns counter-clockwise and my sense of order only accepts the marker at zero (or 12 or 60, as it were). Even a single click to the left prompts 59 more to return time to its proper place.

Knowing my peculiarity, Trina used to sneak a single click when I wasn't paying attention, sleeping or in the shower or otherwise distracted. I would don the watch, time would pass, and I would notice the offset and be happy.

Time passes, and all I want is the intimacy that slows, defeats, and confounds it. Love, Freddy, that's what it is.
from Freddy and Fredericka by Mark Helprin

In the past few years, I check the time in certain moments and again find the inexplicable offset. I click the dial 59 times and I remember and I wonder what force in my life now displaces time. Are the Tralfamadorians just having fun with me, pulling Trina's hand forward through the years to issue that click, that jolt?

There is a "No Parking" sign about a block from my apartment. Sometime, in the last year, as I walked by the sign, I discovered a nail stuck into the bottom of my shoe. I used the metal of the sign to pry the nail out of my shoe and then pushed the nail into the top of the wooden signpost. Whenever I walk by it, I push the nail into the top of the post a little bit more and the nail gets rustier and rustier and more and more stuck and resistant. And I wonder if I should take a hammer to it, bang it all the way in, and leave Seattle.