The clock shows 4:00 PM, even if I break its hands.

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The ground doesn't move anymore.

For the longest time, I believed the earth was the thing yielding—bending beneath the weight of every stride, returning whatever energy was lent to it. But concrete doesn't negotiate. It just waits.

They leave the window open three . Outside, the breeze smells like damp turf and turn four, carried up on an air current that couldn't care less who is breathing it. Down on the oval, the cadence keeps its count—four beats, eight beats, the clean sweep into the straightaway. It is remarkably unsettling to realize how loud footsteps sound when none of them belong to you.

People drop by to measure things. Degrees of rotation. Hours of rest. The exact width required to turn around in a hallway without touching the walls. They keep asking where the pain lives, as though it were a single coordinate on a grid they could simply cross out with a red marker.

I don't bother explaining the static. Or the way the daylight hits the edge of the nightstand at precisely 4:00 PM—the exact minute the second track session used to end.

In physics, they tell you static is just potential energy looking for a circuit.

I think it's just speed with nowhere left to go.

Let them figure out which one is worse.