"Midway on our life's journey, I found myself
In dark woods, the right road lost."

—Robert Pinsky's translation

Sepulchered, you raise your head, lower the sheets, close the blinds, unhinge your body from the rigid impression of your bed.

Serrated morning weighs upon your tomb in one-inch shafts, the floor burning, unfolding, emptying in concentric circles. The world, peopled by your thoughts, becomes hell’s fixture.

You are at all times beset by the circumstances of your cyborg existence. You awake from yesterday and you enter the train, or your car, or you are chauffeured—for even in luxury there is an unsettling regularity to your leisure—and the day is still fixed by the hours in the rotation of the earth. The apparatus of the machine is all-pervasive, imperceptible, inescapable. You are both its prisoner and its operator, supremely unaware of your machine role yet supremely confident in your arrogance that you may operate freely despite your mechanized existence.

Time, leaking effortlessly from your alarm in steady metallic shrieks, signifies an illusion, like motion. We take a step forward and the distance is halved, and the distance is halved, and the distance is halved, but our journey is never complete.

You depress the switch: time stops.

The day is reset.