She had always moved fast. High school, college, the first job, the promotion, the better apartment, the trip that was supposed to feel like freedom but felt like a checklist. She was a blur of efficiency, an expert at the urgent, a stranger to the essential. "All the time in the world" was a cliché she used ironically while rushing out the door.
Today, she had taken it back.
She didn't check her watch. She didn't plan her next move. She walked until the car was a speck, then until it disappeared. She sat down cross-legged in the middle of nowhere and watched a single cloud take twenty minutes to dissolve. She listened to her own breath as if it were a language she was only now learning to speak. alina lopez all the time in the world
She stood on the edge of the vast salt flat, the white crust crackling under her boots like the first step onto a frozen sea. The sky wasn't above her; it was around her, a pale, infinite dome of blue that mirrored the ground so perfectly the horizon had dissolved. She was no longer a person standing on a planet. She was a small, warm smudge in the middle of an equation. She had always moved fast
And for the first time, she knew exactly what to do with it. "All the time in the world" was a
The world, Alina Lopez had learned, was not a place that gave you time. It demanded it, siphoned it in small, insistent sips: a ringing phone, a flashing notification, the low hum of a car engine idling in traffic. Time was the currency of obligation, and she had been spending it freely on things that did not spend it back on her.
Her phone was in the car, three miles back, turned off and buried under a sweatshirt. For the first time in a decade, no one knew exactly where she was. And the silence was not empty. It was full. Full of the whisper of wind across the salt, the thud of her own heart, the slow, deliberate crunch of her footsteps.