The Second Strawberry Bite, Where Time Splits in Two

I am standing at the exact hinge of the afternoon, strawberry cream cold against my lower lip, and I know—only I know—that this single second is a door with two panels.
In Timeline A, no one looks up from their phone across the street; I bite the cone, the sugar floods my tongue like a small forgiveness, and the city keeps its distance. The break-up that left me hollow for three weeks begins to close over itself like a wound learning skin. I walk home on legs that are only mine, and the sun through the plane trees falls in dappled coins I will never spend.
In Timeline B—the branch my heart was secretly pruning—a man with ink-stained cuffs stops mid-stride at the instant my tongue touches the cream, because he has been watching me since last winter when I cried on this same bench and he pretended not to see. His gaze lands, and the clock on the corner stutters; two seconds pass for him, one for me, and in that differential we age a whole year of almost-love into a single nod.
I am the woman holding both futures in one cone. The cold is healing, the warmth is seduction, and between them time waits for my bite to choose which life it will let survive.

Editor: The Clockmaker