Eliot Ambrose was a man obsessed with time. Not in the way of punctuality or schedules, but with the very fabric of time itself, the way it slipped through his fingers, the way it stretched and compressed, and the way it left him perpetually longing for more.

He was a clockmaker, and his shop was a museum of ticking, whirring, and chiming. Grandfather clocks with ornate faces lined the walls, pocket watches gleamed in velvet cases, and cuckoo clocks chirped in perpetual chorus. People came from all over the country to have Eliot mend their timepieces, but he never charged much. He said he was simply happy to help people keep track of their precious hours.

But Eliot’s own hours felt less precious. He’d always wanted more from life: to travel, to write, to fall in love, to learn a new language, to paint, to dance, to see the Northern Lights. Yet, day after day, he wound clocks for others and watched the hands spin around and around, marking the passage of dreams deferred.

One rainy afternoon, a woman entered his shop. She was older, with silver hair and eyes like storm clouds. She placed a battered old hourglass on his counter.

“This belonged to my grandmother,” she said. “It’s stopped working. Can you fix it?”

Eliot examined the hourglass. The sand was clumped, refusing to fall. He promised to do his best.

That evening, Eliot worked late. He pried open the hourglass, cleaned the glass, and loosened the sand. As he worked, he found a tiny inscription on the base:

“For those who wish for more.”

He chuckled. Who didn’t wish for more time? He reassembled the hourglass and, on a whim, flipped it over. The sand began to fall, slowly, steadily.

Suddenly, Eliot felt a strange sensation, as if the shop had grown larger, the clocks louder, and the air thicker. He blinked, and the world outside his window seemed to slow. The raindrops hung suspended in the air, mid-fall.

He looked at his hands. They were younger, no longer wrinkled, the veins no longer prominent. He rushed to a mirror. His hair was dark again, his face unlined.

He laughed, a sound he hadn’t heard in years. The hourglass, he realised, was granting him more time. He could do everything he’d ever wanted.

Eliot left the shop, heart pounding. He travelled the world, wrote poetry in Parisian cafés, learnt Italian in Rome, and painted in the lavender fields of Provence. He danced under the stars in Buenos Aires, watched the Northern Lights from a frozen lake in Norway, and fell in love and out of love, again and again.

Years, or was it decades, passed in a blur of colour and sensation. Every time he felt the weight of age, he would return to the hourglass and flip it, and time would rewind for him, granting him another chance.

But, eventually, Eliot noticed something strange. The world around him began to feel…hollow. The people he met seemed like echoes, their conversations looping, their faces blurring. The places he visited lost their vibrancy; the colours faded. He tried to reach out, to connect, but everyone seemed just out of reach as if separated by a thin pane of glass.

One day, desperate for answers, Eliot returned to his old shop. It was dusty and abandoned. The clocks had all stopped. The hourglass sat on the counter, the sand nearly gone.

He picked it up, turning it in his hands. The inscription caught his eye again:

“For those who wish for more.”

He realised, with a sinking feeling, that the hourglass had given him more time, but at a cost. Each time he rewound his life, he slipped further from the world he knew. The people he loved had moved on, grown old, or passed away. He was a ghost, drifting through borrowed moments.

As the last grains of sand slipped through the hourglass, Eliot understood the twist of his fate. Life was never about having enough time to do everything. It was about choosing what mattered most and living those moments fully because it was their fleeting nature that gave them meaning.

The hourglass emptied. Eliot felt himself ageing in an instant, the weight of all his lost years settling on his shoulders. He sat in his silent shop, surrounded by broken clocks, and finally, he let time catch up with him.