three women

travel in budapest:
a woman is playing, a woman is waiting, a woman is thinking

Tick-tock. Tick-tock. Tick-tock. Tick-tock.

Time.

Calling one second after the other with his sweet, subtle, silent voice, Time flows, and flows, and flows, in its eternal restlessness.
While flowing, Time marks days, then months, then years, then centuries. Time whispers its presence to all living creatures, to inanimate objects, to mountains and stones, to the moon, to the stars, to flowers and trees, insects and whales. It takes good, loving care of them all, perhaps caressing them in different ways, and yet taking them with, in the same continuous, overwhelming and endless manner.

Time doesn’t forget about humans, either. Time likes playing with them and disguising itself, appearing longer, or shorter, quicker, or slower.
A little girl playing by herself will see Time and smile at it, so Time will smile back. Time likes children and is especially kind to them. It gives them plenty of itself, allowing them to live the stories that populate their hearts.

Time keeps an unsteady pace with adults, it’s curious about their projects, their expectations. It likes walking with them and seeing their ideas coming true, or else vanishing forever in the world of the Unachieved. Sometimes in front of a young woman waiting for her lover, Time is so deeply moved it cannot make haste. It is moved by the intensity of her feelings, by that mixture of glacial fear that he might not come and the burning hope that indeed he will. Tear-stained, Time moves on tiptoe, and without making a single noise, it sucks life out of such beauty.

Time likes the company of elderly people, too. Time knows them well, and they know Time. They once thought that Time passed, now they know that it’s them passing. Looking back, they reflect upon what Time has let them do in the years they’ve lived, and now that they have so little of it left, they wish they had loved Time a bit more than they actually did.

Texts by Laura ”Croft” Vivio