ABOUT THE POEM: Chapter 112, What Is Time?, is a meditation that collapses physics, memory, and emotional loss into a single pressure point. Time here is not clocks or calendars. It is defined immediately as “a change in status in someone’s heart.” That opening line is the thesis. Everything that follows is an attempt to justify it without sentimentality. The chapter grounds itself in a brutal asymmetry: yesterday versus today. Yesterday, the speaker occupied total emotional significance. Today, he cannot even greet her as an equal. Time is measured not by years passed but by relational displacement. Marriage, children, and shared history become markers not of progress, but of distance. The college lecture halls function as a temporal echo chamber-proof that the same physical space can contain radically different realities depending on when it is occupied. The photon metaphor is the intellectual spine of the poem. A photon’s proper time is zero; from its perspective, emission and absorption are instantaneous. Yet for the observer, light carries information across vast distances. This becomes an analogy for memory. Emotionally, the relationship ended instantly-between “two zeros.” Experientially, its light continues to arrive, fully loaded with yesterday’s meaning. Time, then, is exposed as a trick of perspective rather than a universal constant. When the speaker says, “Time is the idea that I am real,” he is confronting a deeper anxiety: existence requires duration to be acknowledged. If a love leaves no external trace-no shared life, no witness-did it happen at all? This is why the line “only I know I was here” is devastating. Time becomes the only proof of selfhood, and even that proof feels private, unverifiable, and therefore fragile. The imagery of “a billion unpaid heartbeats” and “a room she never entered” shifts the poem from abstraction to cost. Time is debt. It accumulates interest in the form of hunger, longing, and unrealized futures. The speaker does not romanticize this hunger. It is quantified, exhausting, and repetitive. The scale-billions of seconds-emphasizes how ordinary suffering becomes monumental when stretched across years. The speculative future, where she might whisper regret, is not framed as revenge or triumph. It is a quiet fantasy of symmetry, of time briefly restoring balance. Importantly, the speaker plans to live “a life so grand” not to prove her wrong, but to justify his own endurance. Time, again, is self-directed. The farmer metaphor at the end dismantles the illusion of control. Timing, patience, and care do not guarantee harvest. External forces-rain, hail, randomness-intervene. Love fails not always through neglect or error, but through uncontrollable timing. The final line accepts this without absolution: time’s gravity simply drifted them apart. This chapter ultimately argues that time is not a healer or a judge. It is a silent separator. What survives it is not the relationship, but the witness who remembers.