Autonomous Condition

By the time she raised her hands she already knew the face was gone. Not taken — she had not been robbed of anything. It had simply become light, and then the light had become the shape of an absence, and she had watched this happen from inside the body that still had hands, still had the capacity to reach up and hold the place where the face had been. * * * She held it carefully. This is what the duration is: the fact of hands that know how to hold something that is no longer there, and continue to hold it, because the hands did not get the instruction to stop, and no one has come to give it. The image ends not because she lets go. It ends because the time is finished. She is still holding.