one second by lanay griessner

What happened was this: 

I was standing in my kitchen, looking down at the broken coffee cup on the tile floor, adding it all up. 

There was only one second between the dollar store mug slipping from my hand and it hitting the tile floor. One second was nothing: it was a blink, a sneeze.

I knew one second shouldn’t matter. After all, there are 86,400 seconds in a day. I don’t do 86,400 things in a day. I probably do 10.

So, let’s say I miss 10 seconds a day, no 100 seconds a day. That’s 36,500 seconds a year. If I live to be 80 years old (which is old even in countries full of old people like Italy and Japan) that is just 34 lost days of my life, which isn’t very much. 

I easily lose 15 minutes a day waiting in line at the grocery store or at the bank, staring at nothing on my phone, rewriting emails to sound more business or more casual. 

It was just an ugly cup. 

But it wasn’t just that I broke this cup. I broke everything. I was always one second too late, as if I lived under a strobe light, or in the dead space between the start and stop of a stutter. There was nothing left in my tiny apartment that hadn’t been dropped, scratched, cracked, chipped, or burned by me. 

Had I always been this way? I didn’t know. I couldn’t remember a time that I wasn’t this way, but I could have easily forgotten. What did I even do when I was 11 or 15 years old? I had no idea now. If you asked me what my childhood was like I would tell you: peanut-butter and jelly cracker sandwiches, the smell of the woods right before a thunderstorm, and that one time I found a turtle in the gutter. Everything else didn’t seem worth remembering. 

Am I just stupid? I could be stupid. There is no shame in that. I didn’t write my own genetic code or raise myself in the environment of my choosing. Being stupid is no one’s fault. And if the brain works in milliseconds and the standard processing speed of my brain is 10 or 100 times slower than a normal human brain isn’t that just a bookish way for me to call myself dumb? 

I could be sick. Lots of people, even young people, get cancer now. Colon cancer is particularly on the rise. Although I knew that cancer was too much to hope for, I still asked my doctor a month ago to check if there were worms in my brain or a thyroid thing that could be causing my troubles. Unfortunately, he couldn’t find anything treatable. 

Why was I doing this to myself again? I didn't even like the cup. But it wasn’t just the cup or the second that mattered: 

It’s the looks from strangers from that second. It's being asked: “Are you ok?” when you thought you were doing fine and then you realize you were only kidding yourself and go home and avoid leaving again until you need to go to work or there is an inopportune fire. 

It’s the lost opportunities from that second. The jobs where the interviewer felt like something was just off with me. The unreturned flirtatious smiles from lovers I never had. The music I couldn’t listen to, the movies I couldn’t watch. 

It’s the fear of that second that stops me from ever trying to make a joke, or driving a car, or having a child. 

And when you add up the consequences of that lost second, it’s clear that the coffee cup was everything. 

Lanay Griessner is an American short story writer with a PhD in biology that she doesn’t know what to do with yet. Originally from Springfield, Massachusetts, Lanay moved to Austria in 2008 for graduate school and couldn’t figure out how to leave because the signs were all in German. She now lives in Neunkirchen, Austria with her husband and two children.