It is morning and the gray dove on the ground turns, walks with me, alongside of me. Not sure whether or not to trust, he watches me as we walk. I walk past and don't look back.

I pass the sagging green tents along the gravel walk, along the narrow canal. The tents buckle with time, like all things. They've lost their appeal, their sharp clean lines. They are laden with dull gray-brown dust to a point where they no longer appear to be green at all. The sky is gray with haze and mirrors the silence, the void.

All things as measures of time: meals, showers, convoys, phone calls, layers of dust, foot steps, even the very movement of our bodies, every breath another second.

I am drifting through now, and time moves neither fast nor slow. I feel nothing but the presence of time, and I am one with time itself. My spirit, my mind, is a drum marking time in dull resonating thuds -- morning, night, morning, night, awake, asleep, awake, asleep, another day, another day, another day. I feel nothing but the presence of time. I am the hand on a clock, my rhythms are time itself -- another day, another day, another day.