"I have no time" he said, as if that was some sort of excuse not to be here. He says it as if someone could ever posses time and he just turns away saying he lacks something his ancestors imagined. Time is not something that you can touch or put into a NMR scan to find out what it is. He says he has no time because it is that part of the night when something more important in his priority list is upcoming, and he must be ready. But I'm more pissed about the fact that he uses something as unreal as time as an excuse, than the fact that I'm at the bottom of his list. Damned priorities, damned lack of confidence.

I think of ending it all and then the beginning comes and bites me in the ass. I have been wanting to send him away, to finally put an end to this, more than one time I have packed his things in one big brown box and be about to run away. But I haven't, not once. And today, as I am back, putting his many various papers in the box I find a pink envelope. I have moved his papers so many times, yet I hadn't seen that envelope in months. He gave it to me the third month, of whatever it is we have, there he wrote the most melancholic and and romantic of letters, I gave it back because "This shouldn't get more complicated, keep this, give it to your wife." I said, people often say that time makes you wiser, didn't occur to me.

Of course I had read the pink envelope with a scented paper and meticulous handwriting, and as any other person, I loved the fact that it read wonders about me and how necessary I was. But that letter also meant that it was real, that that which we had been sharing for a time was no longer a hidden magical place, it was crude and solid adultery. I didn't and still don't feel guilty, it was his decision, it was his decision to lie and scape from a life he didn't want. And that was his problem, at least until the feeling of need was reciprocate, from then on it was all a downfall.

He was a salesman and I worked in a lab, there was no way we could have known each other, seriously, no way. Until Katie quit because she got pregnant, and so someone had to manage the suppliers. I had always been in management, never a good position, so it was no surprise the boss picked me for the job. The man in charge of providing the lab with plastic wraps for the packages got retired, he was a very old man who came every 23th of the month. Katie's child and retired Mr. Kirk didn't plan it, but because of these people I got into this mess, I have always pointed them as the accuseables for all of this, whatever it is.

He was charming, he never wore a ring. I was naive and thought he was just a very good salesman. Many women have that instinct, to know when they are being wooed, to know if the guy is a approaching in any way, I don't. But in this story I was not the lamb, nor he is the lion, there was no bloodshed. I was aware he was into me when he started having lame excuses about coming to the lab, I knew how it all operated, how stupid of him saying he thought he might be useful. So stupid of me letting him do it.

The first time he bought me dinner he was straight forward, he was married, no kids though. By then I was already in, in a sinking ship, but already in. I never asked him for him to abandon his wife, I never though it would be of any use, I didn't want to be the cliqued bloody mistress who wants to marry the already married bloody husband. Then things went by its natural course, non of my few friends knew he was married, no one has actually seen him. I bet he has never told any of his classy friends, or his classy wife who he buys a new bracelet of fantasy jewelry every time he feels guilty, which is when he stays at night.

After giving him back the letter in the pink envelop we stopped seeing each other for weeks, I was trying to let him go, to get rid of the complexity, it was simple homotopy. I had to get him out of my system to go on. But then ghosts from the past returned, my father was found dead in the backyard of his house back in his little town. He had done so much wrong to me, yet I couldn't help but to cry, and feel screwed up, because every decision in my life seemed like a way of burring me deeper into that hole of self pity. So I went back to his arms, I damn my weakness.

Time hadn't effect on me in this matter, as any other person I do grow old, I have to pay the taxes every April and I drink champagne ever January; but time was not linear, it was just some cycle. I always ended up in the same self destructive ways, time was not something I had, was not something I could take from the future to replace a lost past. Time was just a dimension, one of the nine I couldn't see, yet, supposedly is there.

And now I take and rip this pink envelop, because it belongs to the past, a time that has gotten out of his hands just like me. I close the brown box take my keys and head off. I want to escape, I want to proggress, to step forward and move on. I want to move on, but that's for people who can have time, not idiots stacked in a cycle with the promise of an ending.

[a little different from the normal material, yet familiar]
By I'm the penguin