The Sleeper Who Dreams in Hours

She does not wear time. Time wears her. Pocket watches hang like ripe fruit from the branches of her hair, their chains tracing lazy rivers across temples that have already forgotten sunrise. Roman numerals bloom where skin should end, XII curling into the corner of one closed eye, VI spilling violet across the soft hill of her cheek like spilled wine no one remembers drinking. Her face is a garden that decided to keep growing after the gardener left , forget-me-nots and feverfew threading through closed lashes, cosmos pressing gentle kisses against her parted lips as though asking permission to steal the next breath. The clocks do not tick in unison. Some run backward, some hesitate at the edge of three seventeen forever, some have given up entirely and let petals take the place of hands. She dreams inside the pause between seconds, where every moment that ever was and every moment that might still be collide like lovers too shy to admit they recognize each other. Her eyelids are the only doors that never open outward. Whatever lives behind them is too vast for daylight, too tender for history, too slow and sudden to be called anything except forever-in-progress. she is the proof that time is not a river but a woman sleeping with flowers in her hair and every hour she ever loved still hanging, still listening, still trying to remember how to wake her gently.