Leore worried about time.

She would catch herself walking through the piazza with the fountain and feel the inexorable passing of time stop.

LEORE WORRIED ABOUT TIME BY FLAVIA BRUNETTI 34THPARALLEL MAGAZINE ISSUE 44

Leore worried about time. She worried about it almost constantly, jumping ahead to what she could be doing in an hour, in a month, in a year, with her lifetime, or rushing back to consider what she could have done differently with that chance, with that day, with that boy, with that place. Sometimes, walking aimlessly, worn out from the rivers of time rushing by in her head, gushing every which way, she considered what she should be doing with this moment, right now, and the sound of ticking clocks made her nervous and unhappy. 

Only occasionally was she at peace, and then only when she felt that there was no time at all; this occurred only in the dead of night, when she woke up with her heart thumping (she tried not to think about her heartbeat too often), or when she swam in the waters off the Tuscan coast, head under the breaking point, where there was such a muffled silence that she was sure she could hear anything coming, that she would know. She spent a lot of time this way, swimming, head under for as long as she could keep it that way, resisting the urge to break the surface and breathe. Breathe in, breathe out. Don’t look up, there is no sky.