Novel & Cerita Time Apart

Two weeks. It had been exactly fourteen days since Liam’s plane took off for Singapore, but to Hazel, sitting in her cubicle on the forty-second floor, it felt like a lifetime. She stared blindly at the spreadsheet on her monitor, clicking her pen against the desk. She missed him with a dull, constant ache in the center of her chest. Their goodbye had been a chaotic, tearful blur at the airport drop-off, and since then, the brutal fifteen-hour time difference had practically erased their communication. When she was waking up to get ready for work, he was exhausted and going to sleep. When she was eating dinner alone in their apartment, he was stepping into back-to-back boardroom meetings. Th

"Colorado is what, three states?" "Four depending on the route." He turned the coffee cup in his hands. "And you're calculating this because?" I looked at him. He looked back at me. We had been doing this long enough that some conversations didn't need all their words. "She goes home in two weeks," I said. "Connecticut. The whole break." "How far?" "Four hours from here." I paused. "Three and a half from Boston." Marcus was quiet for a moment. "Declan."

You've been doing revenge for so long you forgot what love feels like when nothing's on fire. I sit with that too. Then I go back to the contract. But the quiet of the house doesn't change. It just becomes a different kind of quiet. The kind with shape to it. Singapore is twelve hours ahead. Which means when I'm having breakfast he's having dinner. When I'm putting the girls to bed he's starting his morning. We exist in the same day at completely different points of it, which creates a specific kind of distance that isn't about miles. On day eleven I call him at two PM my time, which is two AM his.

And every time, her heart churned quietly. And yet she knows, their relationship, isn’t official, yet. They were separated by 5,000 kilometers. Two time zones. At 6 a.m. Tokyo time, Sometimes when she’d pick up her phone, tempted to send “Did you wake up yet?”—but it would still be 4 a.m. in Jakarta. She knows that question feel ridiculous, even before she send the message. If only, she thought, it were just five kilometers instead. Or even five meters. Close enough to knock and say, “Want to grab dinner?”

Zia Stephanie's POV I felt like time begun to lose its meaning. The passage of time felt like it was heavenly distorted where space time worked into different scale on the other dimension. What should only be a few minutes seemed like I had endured dew hours and what might feel like small width of time could be extensive.

Harper had warned her that the first week back into full faculty rotation would be chaotic, but logic didn’t stop anxiety from crawling slowly into Emery’s chest. ⸻ 🔥 Long-Distance Strain — Time Zones and Missed Moments Seven hours. Seven hours between their schedules. Seven hours that kept creating tiny emotional cracks neither of them meant to cause. Harper’s day began when Emery’s evening ended. Emery’s breakthroughs happened when Harper was asleep. Their relationship had shifted from spontaneous presence to carefully scheduled connection. And it was harder than either of them expected. Emery’s phone finally lit up. Harper Calling Relief rushed through her instantly as she answered.

Anna smiled, "Well, I couldn't sleep after the change of place. Jet lag is difficult to tackle." Lisa smiled. She took a piece of clothing and wrapped it over Anna’s shoulders, "I heard from Webb next door that there is a big time difference between the two countries. It's daytime at home and it might be night abroad." Anna was amused by Lisa's cute look. "Yes! The time difference is really big." "Do you also think too much?" Lisa asked again. The smile on Anna’s face gradually vanished, "It's okay." Lisa sighed softly, "Don't think too much. It all passed by."

THE LETTER Eleven years and nine months. That's how long Silas Vance had been counting down to parole eligibility. Not in days—he'd stopped counting those somewhere around year three when the repetition threatened to break him completely. But in the abstract measurement of time, in the way a man learns to mark seasons by the thickness of his skin rather than the calendar on the wall. The hearing was scheduled for a Tuesday in March.

Harold claimed he was busy, so I busied myself setting up our wedding venue alone until midnight. Over the years, he'd refused to marry me 108 times for various reasons—including but not limited to—his career that was just taking flight, not having a fitting suit, and ugly flowers at the venue. This time, it was because of my future assignment to Touden, the capital city. He didn't want to be in a long-distance relationship. And so I gave up on my bright future and organized the wedding by myself, down to the details.

"Are we leaving now? Can we leave now? How long until we leave? Is it time? Is it almost time?" I check my phone. "Twenty-eight minutes." "That's SO LONG. That's like forever. That's like a hundred years. That's—" "It's twenty-eight minutes," Ethan says from the table, not looking up from his waffles. "That's exactly 1,680 seconds. Which is a long time in seconds but not a long time in minutes. It depends on how you measure it." "Well, it FEELS like forever," Alexander insists. "Feelings aren't the same as facts."