From PRX, this is the moth radio hour. I'm your host Jody Powell.

I grew up with a mother, a sister and a grandmother who were always, always on time. My grandmother especially. She

showed up dressed to the nines and early. Also she would say to me life will make sense

in good time.

I on the other hand respect time, but let's just say the respect is not mutual.

I'm always trying to balance my time correctly or just plainly made sense of it.

In this hour, stories of how time can change the way we understand life. Our first story comes from Otis Gray. Otis told this at our

New Orleans slam at Cafe Istanbul where we partner with W. W.O. Here's Otis.

In the summer of 2018 after seven years of an incredible relationship my girlfriend and I were at a crossroads with our differences

And a big one of those was kids. Grace never wanted kids. I always wanted kids. So that was a big one.

But it wasn't the only one. We were also living in Brooklyn where she wanted to live forever and I was reluctant to move to in the first place and

She valued things like financial stability and you know being able to go out and do nice classy New York things and I was a sculptor turned radio producer so and I I

wanted to go one day without talking about the apocalypse like that was that was her thing and it was also a reason

for her not having kids. I I logged into her Amazon account by accident one day and there was

a flare gun, a map of the Hudson River, and a raft, which led to a really heated discussion about not if the rapture was nigh, but where, in our Brooklyn apartment, she thought we were going to put a goddamn raft. We loved each other very, very much. But it just, it felt like

we wanted things that we couldn't have together.

And no matter how much we tried to change for each other,

it just felt like we were fighting the inevitable

and we were growing apart.

But I'm very stubborn. And I could not see myself not growing old with this person.

And I really, I wanted to show her that I could maybe be the person that sometimes she wished I was.

I thought that would be like the brave thing to do.

...