i. good shoes can't help you— not this time. (can't catch the past, can't stop the future)
.
i knew a girl who collected clocks.
these clocks, they lined her walls and her shelves and they sat on the floor— waiting to be crushed underfoot. she has round clocks and square clocks and clocks that remind me of my grandmother's farm out in the country.
but these clock...they don't run. they just sit on her walls and her shelves and her floor, collecting dust. she collects clocks, and they collect dust.
i asked her once, i asked her the point of collecting clocks, if all she did with them was to wait until they rusted and broke.
she looked at my wristwatch with a raised eyebrow, and i could hear her counting the ticks in her mind.
then she looked at my heart with a raised eyebrow, and i could hear her counting the ticks in her mind, too.
she told me that everyone has a built-in clock, only it's broken and counts backwards.
this clock, she said, counts down from the end to the beginning of time, and it stops when you stop.
she confessed that she thought that maybe - just maybe - if she stopped time in her room, her heart would stop, too.
i stopped, and i said, honey, i wish every eleveneleven, but my wishes never come true.
and then she stopped, and she said, don't you think i know that? all the clocks in the world could never stop time. but at least i tried, and that must count for something.
ii. the weather where i come from is much different from this, i say. & she tells me to get over it. (blur out the skyline)
.
i tell her that i do not like the rain.
i tell her i do not like the rain because it gets my socks wet, and moist cotton is the worst feeling in the world. i tell her this, and i tell her only - because it is the kind of nonsensical things we populate our conversations with.
it is raining blankets that cover the earth in soggy, transparent layers; i can see a hole, making itself known in the toe of the left sneaker that i (usually) never wear. somewhere in the world, a million mosquito is being born.
i am walking under my umbrella, narrowly avoiding puddles i used to jump eagerly into as a child. (time passes as children grow up, and my inner child has gone awol, drafted into a war it did not want to enter.) the drops throw themselves against the plastic of my umbrella, trying to bury themselves under my collar and succeeding - a runaway drop slides down my neck, and i shiver.
i tell her that i do not like the rain one more time, because she has not replied and i think she may have waterlogged ears.
instead, she jumps in a puddle even though she is wearing a white skirt and flip-flops, and she tells me,
don't be silly. sometimes, the sky needs to cry just as much as you do.
a/n: note that the lack of caps is a stylistic thing. so shoot me.