Some poems begin with a story already attached to them.
This one didn’t.
It started with one line:
The clock skipped a tick
and my heart skipped a beat.
I liked the way those two things mirrored each other—the clock and the heart both missing something at exactly the same moment.
But then I started thinking about the second itself.
If the clock skipped it…
where did it go?
And what if it wasn’t actually empty?
What if, somewhere between one tick and the next, time stopped long enough to show you everything that could still happen?
That question became The Missing Second.
The Missing Second
The clock skipped a tick
and my heart skipped a beat.
For one second,
time forgot
what it was supposed to do.
The room stopped breathing.
The curtains hung
perfectly still.
The dust suspended itself
in the sunlight
like even gravity
had been told
to wait.
And somewhere
between one second
and the next,
I lived an entire life.
I saw myself older.
Laugh lines
where worry used to live.
Silver threaded
through my hair.
Hands that finally stopped
apologizing
for taking up space.
I saw people
I haven’t met yet.
Rooms
I’ve never entered.
Photographs
that haven’t been taken.
I heard laughter
belonging to voices
I don’t know.
Yet.
I watched myself
lose people.
Find others.
Break.
Heal.
Break again.
I learned
that some promises last.
Some don’t.
Some people leave
without becoming villains.
Some people stay
without needing to become heroes.
I forgave things
I still swear
I never will.
I stopped waiting
for apologies
that were never coming.
I looked into a mirror
and recognized
the woman
looking back.
For once,
I didn’t ask her
what was wrong with her.
I asked
if she was happy.
She smiled.
Then—
tick.
The curtains moved.
The dust fell.
The world continued
as though nothing
had happened.
No one looked up.
No one asked
where I’d been.
The clock simply moved
from one second
to another.
But I couldn’t.
Because somewhere
inside the second
that never existed,
I had met
every version of myself
I could still become.
And suddenly
I understood
why my heart
had skipped too.
For one impossible moment,
it wasn’t afraid
of running out of time.
It had simply
seen
how much life
could still fit
inside it.
Between the Lines
For a poem about the future, I didn’t want The Missing Second to predict anything.
There are no names.
No specific places.
No exact future waiting at the end of it.
Instead, there are pieces.
People I haven’t met.
Rooms I haven’t entered.
Photographs that haven’t been taken.
Voices I don’t recognize.
I think that’s what makes the future in this poem feel possible to me. It isn’t promising that everything works out exactly the way I want it to.
Actually, it very specifically doesn’t.
I lose people.
I break.
I heal.
And then I break again.
Because seeing an entire life inside that second wouldn’t mean seeing a perfect one.
It would mean seeing a whole one.
There’s a difference.
Yet.
There’s one tiny word sitting by itself in this poem:
I heard laughter
belonging to voices
I don’t know.
Yet.
I gave “Yet.” its own line because I wanted it to interrupt the thought.
“I don’t know” feels complete.
“I don’t know yet” doesn’t.
That one word leaves something open.
Somewhere in the future could be a person I’ve never met who will eventually become impossible to imagine my life without.
There could be a room I’ve never entered that someday feels like home.
There could be a photograph I haven’t taken yet that someday becomes one I can’t look at without remembering everything surrounding it.
I can’t know any of that from where I’m standing now.
That’s the point.
Yet.
Not Everyone Has to Be a Villain or a Hero
These are probably some of my favorite lines in the poem:
Some people leave
without becoming villains.
Some people stay
without needing to become heroes.
I didn’t want the future life inside that second divided neatly between people who stayed and people who hurt me.
Some people are only meant to exist in certain parts of our lives.
Someone leaving doesn’t automatically erase everything that came before it.
And someone staying doesn’t mean they have to save us.
Sometimes people are simply part of the story for however long they’re part of it.
I think there’s something peaceful about imagining a future where I understand that.
The Woman Waiting Inside the Second
Then there’s the mirror.
Of everything that happens inside this enormous life squeezed into one impossible second, this is one of the quietest moments:
I looked into a mirror
and recognized
the woman
looking back.
For once,
I didn’t ask her
what was wrong with her.
I asked
if she was happy.
She smiled.
She doesn’t tell me what happens.
She doesn’t explain how I got there.
She doesn’t warn me about anything coming.
She just smiles.
And I think I like it better that way.
Because the missing second isn’t supposed to hand me a map of my future.
It’s only supposed to show me that there is one.
Then—Tick.
The clock eventually has to move again.
I knew from the beginning that whatever happened inside that second couldn’t follow the speaker back into the room.
The curtains move.
The dust falls.
Nobody notices anything happened.
The clock simply continues doing what clocks do.
But the person watching it doesn’t return quite as easily.
That’s why the opening line comes back in a different way at the end.
At first:
The clock skipped a tick
and my heart skipped a beat.
It sounds like something is wrong.
By the end, we finally understand why the heart followed the clock.
For one impossible moment,
it wasn’t afraid
of running out of time.
It had simply
seen
how much life
could still fit
inside it.
And that’s what this poem eventually became for me.
It isn’t really about stopping time.
It’s about having more of it.
Not knowing how much.
Not knowing what happens inside it.
Not knowing who comes, who goes, what hurts, what heals, or who I’ll be when I reach the other side of all those years.
Just knowing there are still blank spaces.
There are still people I don’t know.
There are still photographs that haven’t been taken.
There are still versions of me I haven’t met.
The clock is going to keep ticking either way.
But maybe every once in a while, it’s worth remembering how much life can happen between one tick and the next.
Until next time,
—Destiny
P.S. If time skipped one second and let you glimpse your future, would you look—or would you rather not know?
