yes, that’s right folks, a man can even be derailed not by a train or a storm or anything so real but a single notification on his phone can send him spiraling through the ether of thought, into an abysmal state of tailspin, where he loses track of the ground and the sky, where he ends up somewhere, sometime else, three, four hours later, after having done, thought something unexpected, really, essentially, having time travelled without ever evaporating into thin air, without ever having had to invent a time travel machine, without ever having witnessed the past or the future outside of regret or worry, having been just taken off the regular path of the morning, after receiving just a slide-in-from-the-top-of-the-screen notification that his girlfriend has booked an AirBnB flat for their upcoming trip to Madrid, a reservation that he was supposed to make and had yet to, although he isn’t irked that she made a reservation, and he wasn’t annoyed even though in her text she asked if he was annoyed that she had made the reservation, his thoughts started to go this way and that way, and he found himself later, after making coffee, on his laptop not forty five minutes after seeing the initial text, imagining himself standing in a field of golden wheat, as the sun beat down upon his shoulders and in his pocket there was not a phone but a thick Swiss army knife and a purple bandana that he had picked up on a trip to Copenhagen three years before, and he was not distracted except by flies which buzzed around his head, but his thoughts ran down a stream unimpeded, and he removed the bandana when the sweat collected enough on his brow to wipe it off.