The clock's hands are black, its face white. Between: a lead band a little before, a little after. Two nights before the break-up, you talked to your mother in a dream, and you said, I'm tired of helping people. Everything went silent, as when the audio cable is pulled from the back of the TV. The night before the break-up, you listened to a voice over the phone, the lights glaring off and on, the phone blanking out, crackling back, no way to tell it that you couldn't hear, that you knew what it was saying. You've stepped across the static-line. You can't tell to which side.