He doesn't leap out of bed in the mornings, but it's easy for him to get up early, these days, even if the sun is firmly blocked out, if the world beyond his door is drowsy and unstirring, without time tearingoff ahead of him and mocking his intentions. He hears the alarm calling for him, louder and louder as though his brother stood at the head of the stairs and called, condescending a few steps each time he did not reply. And with no defensiveness and no evasion, he sits up and meets time as he meant to, just as it is paused, with its head cocked, listening to the alarm that has brought him here, before it passes through the door and onward—he sits up and nods at it, friends they are because he has stopped himself pleading (or shouting or muttering) at its retreating back. He does not assume familiarity, there are no loyalty privileges, only the choice over forgetting. He does not seek to manipulate it to neatly time his own escape; he will use his certainties—of himself—to build more, and then more, like a tidy accumulator; and when time comes with infinite patience to wait, and not to pause, he will throw aside his modesty with no threat of reward, and meet it lazily, with spare seconds and minutes and hours tucked away in deep pockets to enable his indulgences, and by then be indifferent to indulgence altogether. Perhaps.