Here I am, approaching thirty, with only hayfever, a second edition De Profundis and the perpetual elusion of Du Temps Perdu to my name. Now I have lost even my former self’s guilt over my newfound indolence, I spend most of my time sleeping, avoiding the outside world and its pollens, lamenting self-denied cigarettes and alcohol with a face buried in duvets and pillows, too new to be home to fussy old fashioned dust mites.

So what did I do tonight? How did I struggle to escape stagnancy today? I tried to turn back the clock. It was surely an urge from my subconscious itself.

I opened the drawer, the top left of four each labelled in a language few would understand. This is the Drawer of Time. This is the drawer where my collection of watches lives - pockets, fobs, wrists and clocks.

I took each box out, one by one, and inspected its contents. The battery powered masonic watch no longer ticks. The battery has died. I saw no point in winding the demi-hunter brass number I bought in Camden - the crown does not release properly once you’ve pushed it and you can’t set the time. The battery in my backwards watch is dead, as is that in the silver Alpine watch bought in Vancouver. The first watch I ever bought - the one that regulated the synchronicity of the universe, remains broken, overwound. There are others, absent, but I forget their locations. ‘They’ll be around here somewhere’. ‘They’ll turn up in the end’. I wound my great grandfather’s gold watch, and several others, and put them back in their boxes.

I should have stopped there.

I should have stopped because I had forgotten about one of the most precious watches I own. It was given to me, years ago. The two of us had been standing looking in an antiques shop window in a market in Angel, and a pretty little pocketwatch had caught my eye. That Christmas, I opened my presents it had been bought for me. I remember instantly crying with happiness when I saw it, overcome in one of those rare moments where the certainty of being important to someone hits you, unexpected, and almost winds you with the purity and strength of its sincerity. I had an urge to wind it up, to bring its arms to life again, and did.

I really, really should have just left it there.

After I took a brief joy in listening to its steady, tiny heartbeat, I then set the time. Of course, because I’m stupid, I had forgotten that this was a proper watch, an antique for Christ’s sake. For Christ’s sake. I had forgotten that this watch, bought for me by someone who wanted me to know how much they loved me, was not like the cheap junk I buy in Camden on those very rare occasions when I have more ten pound notes than sense. You set the time in a very different way. Failing to notice, or indeed remember, the quiet evident button set into the seam of the watch’s face, I pulled at the crown, gently at first, and then firmly. For reasons known only to my stupidity, and perhaps my self hatred, I pulled harder.

The crown then spat out across the floor, and the stem, ripped from the watch’s innards, catapulted over the carpet with it.

All time stopped moving as I realised what I’d done.

Like a gesture of ignorance to complement the idiocy, I replaced the stem, and the crown, and set the watch, properly this time, to the correct time. When I checked on the watch an hour or so later, I was relieved to find that I could still wind it by the way I’d replaced the stem. My heart sank however when I realised that the hands had not moved since I set them. Through thoughtlessness and coincidence, I had created another carcass of myself - an object once of love and importance that now merely ticks without fulfilling its purpose.

I’d broken it.

Not content with destroying my most valuable timepiece (in both monetary and sentimental terms), my subconscious evidently decided to have a pop at the universe. Almost two years to the day since I fatefully scarred fate onto its outer face - the gold watch from Vancouver - I had an ill advised attempt to replace its inner one with that on the left.

I succeeded only in snapping the arms from the mechanism.

Having destroyed not only one of my most prized possessions but also one of my crafted avatars for the universe in only a few minutes, the universe got its own back by striking me down with crippling stomach pains - either that or my stomach just got tired of all the hayfevery goo I’m no doubt swallowing in my sleep.

My head then began to swim with quite human concepts - silly tellurian preoccupations of comfort, pain, pleasure and contact. The other watches still litter the top of my chest of drawers, nameless and without portfolio now that both fate and sentimentality have been broken. Severed. And yet, unseen in the drawer, I can still hear something ticking. I imagine its arms slowly arcing in blissfully ordered movement.

Boxes, watches, drawers and dark places. And even now as I’ve been writing this, it is already tomorrow. All of this is already in the past now.