Tick-Tock

Imaging

Imagination

Incarceration

Incantation

Reverberation

Revelation

Optimization

Celebration

Andromeda always thought of herself as a normal young woman with a job she likes (at an advertising agency), and a dog she called Chip (off the old block). She is not married, but loves and lives with Mike, has loved and lived with him for about 5 years now. Life is busy, beckoning her on, into her future, as time hurtles on. She is 33.  People nod and imply and mention her biological clock tick-tocking, and aren’t they going to get married, aren’t they going to have children? Can they hear her clock, she wonders? The tick-tock metronome of life is the steady drum of a heartbeat, sometimes loud and reverberating in her head, her ears the canals that invite all sounds until she has to will them closed. In her dreams the tick-tock is expansive as the world itself, the ocean, as if she herself is a wave, her cells wild and blue, each syllable surfing waves both familiar and thrillingly new.