They know that time does not exist, that it is a man made concept constructed to account for the way our bodies age. The decomposition of flesh is measured in abstract, meaningless units. As civilized beings, we’ve used these measurement for as long as we can remember. We built our very language around them; to perceive the world, and to acknowledge it, is to accept the concept of Time as a tangible and governing entity.
Through their pasts and their imagined futures, they’ve realized: Time’s function, when it comes down to it on this human level, is to destroy.

1.
She's cutting butter into flour for biscuits; she's making him breakfast. It's just 7 o'clock, the sun barely over the horizon on this mid-May Saturday morning. He'll sleep for another hour or two at least, reveling in the leisure afforded by the week-end, but she gets restless lying in bed. She hates watching the day disappear behind her, feels it necessary to get up and move with it. So, on this endless Saturday mornings, she finds herself here, in the kitchen making breakfast. She's got the bacon warming to room temperature on a plate by the stove; bread dough rising in a bowl on top of the fridge; bananas cut into medallions, ready to be added to the pancake batter; oranges halved and waiting to be squeezed into the pitcher in the draining rack next to the sink; eggs in the refrigerator door; milk in its gallon jug sitting on the counter, ready to be poured; last night's boiled potatoes, chopped and frying in the skillet.

She works deliberately, each stage of the meal coming together slowly under the weight of her careful hands. When he finally steps into the kitchen, running a lazy hand through his messy hair and giving her that look, she's just taking the last four pieces of bacon out of the pan and getting ready to crack the first egg, sunny-side up into the skillet. She takes a dinner plate from its place in the cupboard, piles it high with pancakes, hash browns, a buttered slice of warm homemade bread, bacon, a warm biscuit, flaky and light, and finally the egg, and sets it on the table next to his glass of orange juice. She sets another egg to frying in the pan, this one for herself, and sits next to him while it cooks. She watches him eat.

Generally speaking, their relationship is simple. Any of their friends would be able to tell you that they’ve been seeing each other for about 8 months now, but they refuse to acknowledge this. They spend time together, and they talk, and have sex. There have even been occasions on which they have cried on each other’s shoulder. They go out with friends, and they drink and dance and get rowdy. They are typical twenty-somethings. The important thing, for both of them (because both have been hurt in the past, by the way relationships grow and are shaped by the time put into them) is that there is no passing in the time they spend together. When they are together, time is stopped. The sun goes down and comes up, their hair continues to grow, their clocks still advance at the same tick-tick-tick pace; the world continues around them in the same way it always has and always will. But they do not accept any of this as Time. To them, time is not a governing entity. They do not let it tell them where they should be with respect to one another. Though they haven’t spoken about it, each of them understands that time between them will not pass. This allows them to be what they are, to eschew the confines of what an 8-month relationship would mean.

So there is that; spending time together without letting that time pass. But there is also a glimmer of something else. They don't live together, but when she sleeps over at his place, which is often, she makes him breakfast the next morning.

These breakfasts. It's when he walks into the kitchen and sees all the work she's put in for him and his stomach that he gets this feeling. It's as if she's teasing him, showing off this little, insignificant inkling of the passion she's got hidden away inside her. As if the breakfasts, if he looked hard enough, could tell him the story of their life together, were they to have one. In that moment he can imagine what it would be like to be with her permanently. What it would be like to live his whole life with her. To make her his wife. As he eats, time unfolds in front of him, and the course of their lives becomes tangible. They move in together, finish grad school. They are married, down south on his parents' land, in the same hay field as his grandparents. They buy an apartment together, start their own family; and their kids! Their kids are spectacular, and as they reach school age, they all move to a bigger place in a nicer neighborhood. And every morning they all sit down to breakfast together- that is how he'll measure the course of their lives, their breakfasts. As the months pass, he'll watch his family across the kitchen table as they blossom and bloom. His wife will become full to bursting with child (a son, a daughter, another daughter, another son), and slowly her hair will be streaked with salt-and-pepper; she'll cut it short and grow it long again; the lines on her face will deepen and the skin on the backs of her hands will begin to reveal the networks of blue veins beneath. His sons' bodies will begin to look like his own, lean and strong and sun-browned; their voices will become progressively deeper, their polite demands for more bacon or syrup sounding more and more each morning like the demands of men; and finally they will start shaving, and being absent for breakfast more and more often. And his daughters: he will watch their hair grow; he will watch as they start paying attention to their appearances; as they change their attitudes, and as they close themselves off and open themselves up; and he will watch in amazement and wonder as they being to resemble their mother, as they begin to learn from her how to make breakfast.

When he’s finished eating, he does the dishes. He cleans the kitchen while she gets dressed. As he’s putting the plates into the dishwasher, she comes over and pats him on the back. She means to say, I’ll see you around. As the door closes behind her, she’s suddenly transformed into the timeless version of herself, with whom he does not make plans. The future closes in on itself and ceases to exist; the tick-tick-tick of the clock on the wall carries on, as meaningless as it was the night before.