About an hour. That’s how long it takes to walk from my house to my office if you stop at the cafe on the way and shift foot to foot, dithering between the lentils and the salami, settling on the lentils, and then pour yourself down Underhill to Bergen to Vanderbilt to Dean to Carlton to the detour at Atlantic Yards where you crack open your sandwich and gnaw at it, standing on the pedestrian bridge staring out at the tops of the LIRR trains washed in cold blue light, flooding yourself with metaphors until you sputter and give out under the weight of how wonderfully sweet it all is, and then scurry fast the last few blocks because you’ll probably be late but really you’re three minutes early which makes you a quarter of an hour prompter than everyone else because that’s just how you and time are, and hasn’t everything gotten better since you just embraced that about yourself instead of keening and apologizing for it?