At the bottom of a dusty box, I found four old watches. Each one with time stopped at a different hour.
This fact of suspended hours gave me the shivers.
Anyway, without giving more ground to my imagination, I tried them on again, all very beautiful, so I decided that the next day I would take them to change the battery so I could wear them again.
That night I slept peacefully.
The next day I woke up with a smile and the aroma of steaming, fragrant coffee resting on my bedside table.
I was a little surprised, but in that state between sleep and vigil, I let myself be carried away by a feeling of fullness.
I got up and when I looked in the mirror, I almost had a heart attack. It was me, yes, but twenty years younger.
I’m dreaming, I told myself disappointed and went back to bed.
It was at that moment that I realized that I had one of the watches with the time stopped, on my wrist. I had forgotten to take it off when I went to sleep.
It was obvious, the old watch had acted as a wrist time machine (that’s how fertile my imagination is).
I surrendered to that gift of time, of youth and drank from that vaporous cup of coffee steaming with memories.
Later, I got ready and went to the watch shop to change the batteries in my old watches.
Half an hour later they were returned to me, shiny and all adjusted to the local time, 11:01 a.m. on August 9, 2023.
I decided to wear them all at once, two on each wrist.
With my “here and now” realigned, I hurried home ready to receive the gifts of the day.
In the end, as the great Persian poet Omar Khayyam said:
“…it’s later than you think…”
Leonor Henríquez (Caracas, Venezuela) Civil Engineer by training (UCAB 1985), writer and apprentice poet by vocation. From her time in engineering emerged her Office Stories (1997), another way of seeing the corporate world. Her latest publications include reflections on grief, Hopecrumbs (2020) (www.hopecrumbs.com) and “The Adventures of Chispita” (2021) (www.chispita.ca) an allegory of life inside Mom’s belly.
Today she shares her “impulsive meditations” from Calgary, Canada, where she lives.
leonorcanada@gmail.com