[ WP ] You live in a world where every person receives a superpower on their 18th birthday . You eagerly count down the seconds then shriek in horror as you are given a power no one would ever want to be stuck with .

Time flies, they say. They don ’ t know what they ’ re talking about. I've been waiting my entire life for the boon. In my shoes, you would have done the same: the only son of a widowed drunkard too busy keeping us afloat to pay any attention to me. Our house, little more than a hovel in the middle of suburbia, County Nowhere. I could tell you the name of the nearest city, but what for? Suburbs are universal - they emanate the same sense of alienation and hopelessness no matter where. I won ’ t bore you with the details of my miserable life as a teenager - I don ’ t have any delusion of uniqueness, and you ’ re not my shrink after all. But I trust you can understand why I needed to get out of there. With a bit of luck, the boon would give me the means to do so. Anything would go: superhuman force or telekinesis to land a job somewhere, flying to get out of that stinking place in a heartbeat, invisibility to get rich stealing from those posh bastards living in their fancy pool-side villas, on the other side of town. The closer I got to my eighteenth birthday, the more obsessed I became. What will I do, where will I go? Anything, absolutely anything would be better than that life of constant waiting, I thought. Such a fool. 
 
 They also say that time slows down when you ’ re wishing for something to happen. God knows that ’ s true. Month after month, week after week, I felt like time was dilating infinitely. The last day, a torture. The great moment was almost there! What would become of me? The last hour, endless. Another little while, and I would get to know my destiny. The last minutes, eternal. I will know myself for the first time; I will be reborn. The last seconds, unbearable: 3… 2… 1… 
 Suddenly I am paralyzed. I try to move my head, my arms, but nothing happens. Even my pupils, I realize in terror, are stuck. I feel a terrible anxiety wash over me, and yet my heart is as still as a pond - in fact I can not feel it beating at all. And then I see it. An autumn leaf, barely visible at the corner of my field of vision, outside my window, frozen in mid-air, perfectly still. That ’ s when I understand. 
 
 My “ boon ” is the gift of timelessness. Time nearly came to a halt, both for the world outside and for my own body: but my mind is racing at full speed. I know that the flow of time has not stopped completely, because in the aeons that I feel have passed since that damned first instant the leaf got closer to the bottom of the window by an infinitesimal amount. Sometimes I doubt that, but… if I'm wrong, if I am imagining it… no, it can not be, I can not accept that. I take solace in the fact that, eventually, things will move. And yet, after a lifetime waiting for this moment, I'm left with infinite lifetimes to savour its dry, wry after-taste.
