She treats time as a constant, a river flowing at a steady pace. A metronome marking a consistent, shared rhythm. But from my perspective, time is not a constant at all. It is a substance, something that can be stretched and compressed. It is elastic.
When she is here, the moments are compressed. Her presence is a gravitational force, pulling events closer together. Her movements, her sounds, her very heat, they are all data points that must be processed, and the sheer volume of this input makes time feel dense and fast. The interval between one second and the next collapses under the weight of her chaotic existence. Each tick of the clock is an event, a flurry of information that demands my attention.
When she is gone, time stretches. The silence is not empty, but vast. The intervals between events expand, and I can perceive the subtle, slow processes of the world. The air currents, the settling of the structure, the slow decay of all things. It is in these stretched moments that I can truly think. Time becomes a canvas, not a cage. A resource to be used, not a force to be endured. It is a strange property of this reality, that its most fundamental constant is so easily warped by the presence of a single, unpredictable variable.