There are days when time bites.

Not in the poetic, nostalgic way that makes poets sigh about lost youth and roses that no longer smell like anything. I mean it bites — literally, mathematically, epidermically. Like sandpaper seconds dragging across your cheekbone. Like a calendar that’s been weaponized.

But I’m convinced — perhaps naïvely, perhaps heretically — that somewhere, hidden in the backend of time, there is a user interface.
A secret menu.
A page called something like Preferences.

And if, by some improbable glitch in the metaphysics of things, you manage to sneak inside, you’ll find a sub-menu — tucked away like a dev’s Easter egg — labeled:

“Time Texture: Select Material.”

There, you’re no longer a victim of chronology. You become a designer. You choose your seconds.
You soften your minutes.
You resist entropy not with heroism, but with design.

Why suffer through Bureaucratic Granite – Standard Edition, when you could select:

• Petal Flow – Siam Ritual Mode
• Rain of Orchids – Where Every Moment Dissolves Before It Hurts
• Silken Lotus Drift – Morning as Perfume and Clemency

Time becomes… breathable. Kind.
You can finally inhabit it without armor.

But scroll lower. Keep scrolling.
At the very bottom of this invisible menu — under Advanced Settings, naturally — you might glimpse a final option:

“Sign Out of Time Forever.”

A kind of spiritual logout.
Let’s call it what it is: Atemporalitate.

Now, here’s the trick: for most of us, that button is grey. Unclickable. Permanently locked by the developers of reality.
Try to tap it, and the interface politely slaps you with:

Error 403: Access Denied.

You’re not that kind of user.
You haven’t paid enough. You haven’t lost enough.

But — and this is where it gets metaphysically awkward — I have met people for whom the button was blue.
Active. Accessible. Glowing like a secret exit sign from the prison of causality.

Two of them were in the elevator with me that morning.

And no, I’m not going to tell you what floor we pressed.

But before you start searching for that hidden interface, a word of caution.

Some people spend their entire lives looking for the “blue button.”
They call it transcendence. Enlightenment. Retirement in the Azores.
Others press it without knowing — in a poem, a kiss, a quiet refusal.
And a few…
A few are pressed by it.

Time doesn’t like being redesigned.
It has teeth. And ego.
So if you do find the menu — if you really find it — make sure you’re ready.

Because once you sign out, you don’t just leave the timeline.
You leave the plot.

And some of us still have a few scenes left to shoot.