3,482
Our love can now be quantified in finite terms. The clock that seemed destined to spin forever has laid its hands to rest. It no longer produces a running tally but instead displays a final count.
3,482 days.
A clock still turns inside my heart’s remnants, but it is exclusive to me, for only my love still endures with its eternal flame.
I hold, with dear hope, that somewhere your clock still spins and that our love can transcend this mortal plane and prove itself everlasting.
To count before was of no concern to me. We were together and I cared only to never part until both our dying days, but now I’ve been left with a finite number to count, never satisfied with the final tally. Never satisfied that the number is set into stone and never to improve.
Never satisfied that for as long as I may live, my time in true love becomes a smaller part of my journey with every day that goes by. Every motion of the clock that still spins perpetuates the motions that push me further away from love incarnate.
168 days deprived from claiming a decade of love. 168 days short of the 16th day of the 8th month, our annual celebration of true love realized together.
The signs were everywhere that destiny was afoot when our magnetic attractions drew us together. As I look around for signs of you, I see signs of a twisted fate appear instead.
Was I destined for the purest forms of love and bound to this most painful fate? Did I mistake my destiny for your doom?
Acceptance does not equate letting go; they are not one in the same. One is achieved through time and perhaps a grace of closure, but this love is immortal, invincible, and it’s not just upon my grasp. Our love is me.
Half the man I used to be as now only my love lives on. A lonely husk and a shell of a shell, a shame you might see or bear from witnessing me now.
Again, I see the hands on the clock move. Further away I’ve become. Less of a life spent in pleasant and precious times.
I’ve no choice but to move one foot in front of the other and within kicking distance of the cans on the road. I must keep my feet in motion, because months have passed, and I have been motionless as the world has spun around me.
It was just yesterday that you were here, yet it feels like I’ve been grieving for years. It feels like we had but a mere few moments together when we had nearly ten years.
Too young, too soon, too long to be alone. Too long to bear the thought of you as love forever gone.
One foot steps in front of the other. One slight motion on the clock. One more tear of remembrance.
Some things die down. Some pains lose their grasp. Many have dug in their talons to never be unlatched, but the fog of grief has slightly thinned. Not enough to see long and winding roads, but enough to know I’m at least on a road and walking in some direction. I don’t see where it goes and I haven’t the slightest clue or care, but whichever direction is chosen is considered forward for now.
The road may lead somewhere, or it might not. There’s no dead-end signs on this road, you find out as you go. There is always a chance it leads me right off the cliff, and to deny is to hide the elephant and ignore the risk. This road I walk without you, wherever it leads me now, I guess I’ll call it forward.
