When one lives alone one learns to find the clockwork in the trees, the ticking cogs in the bark and the berries and the soil underfoot and the tick-tick-ticking of the sidewalk as it cycles past, a conveyor belt of life. When one lives alone, you find your own routine. you live in a shoebox, the shoes washed downstream when you were eight, so, you make do with tissue paper and counting your breaths and the escalator rounds of day and night and meals and sleep, the tallying of seconds minutes hours days months, punctuated by walks at five and stove tickers at six, the orange glow of sunset a silhouette in your memory of your shadowbox of time. It's not bad. If anything, you are very good at counting, and when snow falls outside and your joints grow rusty, you stick out your tongue and tick.
