June 12, 2025

Writing from a prompt from "645 Things to write about" by the San Francisco Writer's Grotto.

Prompt: "What can happen in a second"

It doesn’t seem like much, a single second, but it can be miraculous or catastrophic. In a single second a bomb can triggered or an newborn can voice it’s first cry. Both are momentous, but take only a single second. 

A second can be pregnant with potential that is missed. A finger pulls a trigger a candidate turns to say something. Oh the potentiality born in that moment!  a possibility begins to unfold, but in the next second the possibility is still-born. Still it is a second that grazes past the mind, but catches us again and again in its possibility. 

The chalk outline of my body in “le petit mort” as it lies upon the bed, a strange spark explodes inside my body. .And I know it at that very second, although no one will believe I felt it, and that second becomes a inevitable, unavoidable march to other seconds: a pink line, a panic, an explosion of pain, a scream for help. A second of consciousness that dovetails around the ketamine. Although minutes occur in that lapse. In my mind they are one second. 

Or in a second nothing can, subjectively, happen. Time can drift and drift, seconds to minutes, to hours to days, weeks, years…. All the seconds slip by like pennies collected in a glass jar, and seldom spent.