Matter of Time: A Short Story

Time. I was always looking at the time these days. Time for where I had to be for the millions of things I had to do.

It’s funny how your life never pans out how you think it will. How the dreams and aspirations that you originally envisioned for yourself seem to fade into the rearview mirror, seemingly becoming nothing more than a distant memory.

So, imagine my surprise when someone appeared to shed a new light on my previously held conceptions of how I now viewed the world. Someone who challenged me to think, to dream again, and to value what I have, the potential to still have the things I most desired.

Someone who momentarily made me think of time in a different way. About how long I had left with them. About how some of my other previously scheduled time slots could be shifted and bargained in place of this new someone's time slot.

And it had happened in the most unexpected of ways.

“Shannon? Are you staying late tonight?” Bob asked, peeking his head over the cubicle's soft gray fabricated wall. “If you are, the rest of us are going in on a pizza to split.”

Pulling my gaze away from the shut-down windows on my computer screen, I offered a small smile. “No, I think today I will be heading home on time.”

“That’s a first,” Bob commented, his dark, fuzzy eyebrows raising. “What's the occasion?”

“No occasion. Just meeting someone for dinner is all.”

“Ah, in the dating game, I see,” Bob commented, a sly smile forming on his lips. “Well, I hope you have better luck than I did. The last girl I met on an app told me I was in a time slot. Turns out, she had four other dates lined up that night. She was speed dating in her own sense.”

Choosing to continue my exit routine, I simply nodded in answer and began to gather my belongings.

This was a welcome change to the hustle and bustle that had been my chaotic life for the past five years.

No one tells you in college just how draining a career can be. Between learning how to do it in real life rather than simply through the textbooks read in my bedroom was a whole other experience. And how trying to climb the ladder to a better position included dedicating all your hours to your job and hoping that someone is able to see your value.

I pushed these thoughts aside as I drove down the street, past the bakery, the thrift store, the town square, and the discount grocery to the edge of town as the sun settled on the horizon and the sky was painted with a mixture of pinks, reds, and oranges, followed by the dark blue sky behind me.

And as I pulled past the bright yellow mailbox with hand-painted marigolds, I glanced around at the pops of colored florals lining the gravel drive, the gently swaying leaved arms of branches dancing in the breeze, and the paver-tiled pathway winding from the driveway to the small front porch.

Stopping my car, I cut the engine and stepped out into the warm air, letting the sounds of night crickets and distant traffic from the highway wash over me.

“Oh, good! You're just in time,” a voice said.

I looked up to the small front porch, decorated with a wooden wind chime, colored potted greenery, two small sitting chairs, and finally a small, petite old woman.

“I got out of work as soon as I could,” I answered, making my way across the pavers, my flats echoing with soft thuds.

“I hope you read up to chapter five. I have thoughts, Shannon. So many thoughts,” she said with an exasperated expression, her hands leaving her hips and dropping to her sides dramatically. “But first, we eat.”

Nancy had been my grandmother's best friend for fifty years. They had done everything together. And when my grandmother died, so did a part of Nancy.

So, imagine my surprise when Nancy bumped into me at the grocery store. It was like bumping into a piece of my grandmother.

We got to talking, and she’d disclosed that her children and grandchildren had moved away some time ago, and without my grandmother, life felt…lonely. So, being the polite person I am, I offered to start having a weekly dinner with her.

The smile that lit up that woman’s face was like seeing a ghost of the person she used to be, the person she used to be with my grandmother.

Now here I was, nearly six months later, still having our weekly dinner together and now starting our own book club.

For the first time in years, I wasn’t running out of time—I was giving it.