Timepiece

That clock never worked, now did it? We never could find the weight so it could tell time, so time just stopped. It has been perpetually 3 AM or PM in this house since the day it first graced the mantle. It seems so strange that it takes a little weight for time to move on, but to much weight can bring it to a halt again.
I have just passed 3 AM tonight in the middle of another one of my fits of insomnia. Out with L to the movies and dinner tonight, I came home alone and restless and that clock just sat there telling me nothing much has changed. I had to get out of the house again and go to places where the timepieces do keep track. I need to feel like I am moving on, even if this place can seem warped in time.

It reminds me of how JC said that in 1999 she reverted to playing out dramas of a 10-year-old again. Perhaps I have been trapped at 21 or 25 for too long. Like I didn’t get finished with something back then, and so now have to keep replaying it. Perhaps there hasn’t been enough weight, or there’s been too much, and I can’t seem to escape the perpetual 3 AM or PM.
If I were to wind the clock it would move too fast without the weight, and, in fact, eventually I would get all of this time back. But that’s no way to experience time.
When you were here, it seemed like time stood still. Sometimes for better. Sometimes for worse. Sometimes I wish that we still could be in that time trap, weightless and in love.
There came a time chasm though, a correction like leap year, in which things had to jump radically forward and I was caught off-guard. I am getting used to it now, but it still catches me off-guard when I really think about it. Was it too much weight, or not enough?
I think of the days in which the clock sat on Thama’s mantle. It must’ve worked back then. That face must have seen so many things: love, hiding from relatives, momentary sadness, a woman sliding into a new dimension. Time moved then in that Enoree way. It was still time.
I guess I have thought for too long that if I left the clock there, that I could make time stand still. Or that maybe, I could take the hands and move them backward, and more backward. Eventually it could be before September 4, or August 10, or July 31, or possibly even before I got drunk and mean, or before I ever got drunk. I could live it all over again. But alas, it only holds time still. Nothing moves forward, but nothing can move back. That’s the one sure thing. But I did think that maybe time would stand still until things could work themselves out. I would realize a direction. Something would define itself.
I am so foolish to think these things, so now I must stop. Believing in time like that, is just like believing that somehow words can really change the world, or a heart.
Soon I will have to give that clock back to you, its rightful owner, and it can sit and not tell time for a while longer – until you find the appropriate weight to vest it with, and perhaps both our hearts will slowly begin to heal.