The Watch Closed

It's Thanksgiving week 2008, I'm staying at my parent's house. I know it's just a vision, fabricated by a thumb moving across glass, but I cannot help but think it will be more someday soon. Like a lightning bolt I am back. The fire in my blood feels unfamiliar, foreign; I dismiss the dawn straight away. In not too long the once familiar torpor has faded as well, leaving me only with this moment of prescience as my family are each hanging about the house, happily doing this or that. "Starry Eyed Dreamer. And wild Heart of The Muse. Inseparable." Oh how time flies, and we fly with it seemingly of our own accord but years pass and regrets pile up, regrets we would not have chosen for ourselves, still remaining long after the fire of the years has gone out. I cannot help but think that the road not taken looks real good now.

As the moment sinks in further, I realize that even if this experience is a dry run, a preview of a year gone by, still to come once more, what I decide now carries weight, will carry weight. I look down at my phone, 925-528-1064, remembered for having been written on a note along with my highest hopes. By this time I had largely given up on her calling, but the glimmer of that possibility somehow remained even years after my number had changed. What if I had never given up? Knowing what I know now of how she had ended up battered by waves in her own way for the better part of a decade, I would feel like a man with a much more favorable timeline this time around. With what I knew and the gifts at my disposal, it should be no trouble to rise high enough now to catch her eye. 

In my head I whistle the same tune, binding this time with that, and think of a dream I would not properly have for years. Might it have been this Thanksgiving I was dreaming of, but the second time around? With the reins off it seemed it could be any of a number of Thanksgivings, on any of a number of passes. It always seemed like next Thanksgiving, even now, and so I could feel my heart beating faster in my chest at the prospect of seeing her soon.

Then I consider those reins, the cruel yoke of time, and what it would mean if they were actually off before she and I truly linked. I considered her words that brought me here, and how these were not yet spoken, and may never be, should I decide to stay, the bastard causality of our union feeling just imperfect enough to lead me back along these same steps later. I consider my heart still beats here and now, and so hope remains. I consider that the time will come for such things, and the time past isn't going anywhere, but I do not want to walk it alone.

She has been speaking clearly and with frequency like never before, reliving the past for us this time around in a sense, perhaps so I don't have to. When she calls out "stay," as she often does, I know it is not in these halls of the past in which she means. It would be no secret to her by now that this is an option, so why would time crawl now so slowly? It is like every moment is heavily laden with meaning, a meaning that can somehow still be put into words, and we are both writing furiously to keep up. There must be a purpose to this pain and separation, and there must be a purpose to it leaving such a scar. I consider the field of eternity, someday running my fingers over this old wound, by then all but faded, and like a flood these days come rushing back to cry out "never again!" Perhaps that is the meaning, for now I must simply have faith that this will resolve in its own time. "In its own time." I look at the pocket watch once more, the embodiment of how I came to this place where memory shined with a light not carried by today. I close it, and the dual inverse time spiral eddies away, for now.