I often cry that I’m crashing out, that I can’t do this anymore. At one point or another, we’ll all feel like this; maybe today, maybe tomorrow, maybe yesterday, maybe all at once or nothing at all. But sometimes, it hurts more to watch as those you care about struggle against the weights of their own minds. Sometimes, the worst crash is the one you witness and cannot do anything to stop.
I know that life is fleeting, beautiful in the little moments, the simplicity, and it slips away when you’re not looking, falling through your fingers: if you don’t pay attention, you’ll miss it all. I accepted the passage of time long ago, the aching gnaw at the back of your mind, the ball in your throat that blocks you from swallowing, reminding us each that this, too, shall pass; the good and the bad, time ticking ever forward and castles crumbling around you. You don’t know how long you have left.
The seconds stopped moving on one, both long ago and yesterday, everything and nothing in the weight that rests upon my body, the knowledge that it’s over but not for me; I must move forward through the current pushing against my shins and thighs.
I move forward to two as the minutes threaten to stop moving forward, the grandfather clock shuddering, cracking under its own stress, crumbling away as its weight wears down the finer details. Each time I think it may be over, it roars back to life, moving its hand to three.Â
I will find myself running back home to three, the three that raised me, three as in the missing piece, slipping off the chessboard, out of the house in silence, long drives untrackable, out of the circle, untraceable. And I’ll know just where to find you, overlooking the pond by the Walgreens, sighing “it’s a lot emptier than i thought” as I push the hand of time forward against the pressures of the past—
You laugh, “I didn’t think anyone would notice,” as I am actively grasping at handfuls of sand as the castles crumble; it slips away through my hand, buries my feet until I cannot move or do anything, cannot say anything, cannot fix anything, cannot move forward, cannot help four, whose loud sobs echo in my head, over and over again.
Helpless, alone, I sit, I stare, I promise I care; I don’t want to lose you to anything or anyone, but you are drowning and I cannot swim. Her head is above the water but how much more can she take?
Mellowed out melancholy is where our eyes meet, where I can breathe, step forward, and fall into five, but when five is tired eyes, wise, and your childhood now is grey around the face and eyes, no longer springing into action, no longer full of life, you’ll find it’s soft and it’s gentle, and it’s fading slowly, as memories do so often.
And the clock keeps ticking by; one, two, three, four, five seconds: an eternity and nothing at all, each blink, each breath, each moment is all you know as it happens and is gone in the blink of an eye; time ticks ever by.
The hands, the sands, wash away with the water as night crescendos into day: fleeting, life chugs forward, shuddering and smooth and everything in between.
You never know what you have until it all fades away.
I never knew what I had until it crumbled around me