The first time I froze time, I cried.
Not because I was scared.
Because I had just missed my bus.
I remember standing at the bus stop, watching it disappear around the corner while silently preparing myself for my mother's inevitable lecture about "waking up five minutes earlier."
Then the world...
Stopped.
The leaves froze in midair.
A bird remained suspended above the road, its wings halfway through a flap.
Even the clouds stopped moving.
I stood there for a full minute before whispering,
"...Hello?"
Nothing answered.
Carefully, I stepped onto the road.
The bus was still there.
Not driving.
Not even idling.
Just... frozen.
I walked up to it, climbed aboard, and tapped the driver's shoulder.
Solid.
Like a statue.
I climbed back down, walked to the bus stop, took a deep breath...
...and wished time would start again.
It did.
The bus drove away.
Nobody screamed.
Nobody noticed.
The world simply continued as though nothing had happened.
Except...
I was no longer late.
At first, I thought it had been a dream.
Until it happened again.
And again.
Soon, freezing time became my solution to everything.
Late for school?
Freeze time.
Forgot my homework?
Freeze time.
Dropped my phone down the stairs?
Freeze time.
Need a moment to think before answering a question in class?
Freeze time.
Life became wonderfully unfair.
I never panicked anymore.
I never rushed.
I always had more time.
Looking back, that should have been my first clue.
Time had frozen.
I hadn't.
At first, the difference was too small to notice. I'd stop time for a minute to tie my shoelace before class or finish an assignment I forgot about. Sometimes I'd wander through the frozen streets simply because I could. There was something strangely peaceful about an entire city holding its breath. Cars sat motionless in the middle of intersections. Rain hung in the air like tiny glass beads. Once, I spent half an hour trying to poke a pigeon that had been suspended three feet above the pavement. It remained thoroughly unimpressed.
The world became my pause button.
I became greedy.
Five extra minutes before a maths test became twenty. Twenty became an hour because I got distracted reading a comic book in a convenience store. Nobody noticed the missing chocolate bar I borrowed while time was frozen. I always left money on the counter before restarting the world. It felt important to maintain standards.
Life became ridiculously easy.
Then people started asking questions.
"You look tired," my mother said one morning.
"I stayed up studying."
"Aren't you on holiday?"
"...I studied... recreationally."
She accepted that answer far more easily than she should have.
Weeks passed. Then months. Every problem had the same solution. Freeze time. Think. Fix it. Resume. It wasn't cheating, I told myself. It was... efficient.
Then, one afternoon, I noticed something while brushing my teeth.
There was a tiny silver hair above my left ear.
I stared at it.
Pulled it out.
Convinced myself the bathroom lighting was defective.
A few days later, there were two.
Then three.
I laughed.
Stress, I decided.
Apparently, exams were aging teenagers now.
The real problem appeared on my birthday.
Seventeen.
Or... supposedly seventeen.
Out of curiosity, I opened the stopwatch app on my phone before freezing time. I spent the afternoon wandering through the silent city, climbed three buildings I definitely wasn't supposed to climb, ate an entire pizza while sitting on the roof of a frozen train, then watched the sunset without the sun actually moving.
When I finally restarted time, exactly four seconds had passed.
My stopwatch read six hours and twelve minutes.
I did the maths.
Then I did it again because I didn't like the answer.
Over the last three years...
I hadn't lived three years.
I'd lived three years...
And another seven months.
The world had stayed seventeen.
I hadn't.
For the first time since discovering my power...
I was afraid to use it.
---
After that day, I treated my power the way people treat the glass case labeled 'Emergency Only'.
Most days, I ignored it.
Being late no longer mattered. I accepted bad grades when I deserved them. If I forgot my homework, I forgot my homework. It turned out the world didn't end nearly as often as I'd convinced myself it would.
But emergencies have an annoying habit of appearing when you least expect them.
The first was my little sister.
She chased a ball into the road without looking.
I didn't think.
The world stopped.
The car froze inches from her.
I carried her back onto the sidewalk, then stood there for what felt like hours trying to calm my breathing before letting time move again. To everyone else, I'd simply reacted quickly enough to pull her away. My parents hugged me. My sister cried. Nobody noticed that, somewhere during those frozen hours, another few strands of silver had quietly appeared above my ear.
It kept happening.
A child trapped inside a burning building.
A cyclist about to be crushed by a falling sign.
A bridge railing giving way beneath someone's feet.
Every time I promised myself it would be the last.
Every time I broke that promise.
People started calling me lucky.
Lucky enough to always be in the right place.
Lucky enough to always react in time.
If only they knew that luck had nothing to do with it.
Years passed.
Not on calendars.
Inside me.
The extra hours became days. The days quietly became months. Eventually, they became years that existed nowhere except in my memory. My friends still joked about turning eighteen. My parents still wondered why I always looked so exhausted. Meanwhile, I had celebrated birthdays the rest of the world never saw.
I was older than everyone believed.
One evening, standing outside my apartment, I made myself a promise.
No more.
No matter what happened next...
Time would keep moving.
That promise lasted exactly eleven days.
A construction crane snapped.
Steel began falling toward a crowded street.
Without thinking, I reached for the familiar silence.
The city froze.
I watched the twisted metal hanging motionless above frozen people who had no idea how close they'd come to dying. It took me hours to find a safe way to move everything without causing another disaster when time resumed.
When I finally finished, I didn't restart the world.
Not immediately.
Instead, I climbed to the roof of the tallest building nearby.
The city stretched beneath me, perfectly still.
Cars waited patiently at green lights.
Clouds hung motionless above the skyline.
Even the stars seemed frozen in place.
I sat down on the edge of the rooftop and closed my eyes.
"This is the last time," I whispered.
Someone coughed behind me.
My eyes opened.
Slowly, I turned.
An old man sat comfortably on the neighboring rooftop, holding a steaming cup of tea.
Time was still frozen.
He took another sip, smiled, and gave me a small nod.
"How many years have you lost?"
ns216.73.216.176da2
and then Add to home screen.