Mickey had never fully understood the concept of time. As a kid, bruised and dirty by weeks of avoiding the house where his father, drunk and angry, would rise up and come down on anything in his wake; Mickey understood time as events and moments, instead of a measuring stick to hold your life up against.
There was a time to stay quiet, a time to fight back, a time to hide.
He hadn't been aware that there was a distinction between a time to be a child, and a time to worry about the adult things. For Mickey, life had always been about the latter, trying to fix the broken things with fists and bloodied faces; understand the adult things with child eyes. For Mickey, there was a time to swing the bat at the face of the man who sold the last bit of heroin his mother had shot up before taking her last breath, eyes to the heaven, mouth slack, and body slumped in the bathtub, track marks running patterns up her arm.
There was a time to hit, a time to swing, a time to hear the crack of bone.
No one had ever explained, nor had he ever found reason to take the time, or wish for more. Why would he? For years now, Mickey, now brutal, muddied and hardened, found no reason to rush home when walking in the shadows of an alley; he was the shadow people ran away from in the night. He was the concrete meeting jaw, the metallic smell of blood, the living product of a horror film. So when teeth bit, and hands bruised, Mickey didn't think of breathing and taking the time to remember the path the tongue made along his skin; saliva warm and reminding that he, for a reason unknown to him, was something worth tasting. And when the circuit of his nerves crackled and bursts of light appeared behind his eyelids, Mickey rushed through the finger light touches tracing the scars marking his skin, ignored the way his skin would ignite to the warm breath against his neck, and closed his mind to the words he thought he could hear being whispered into his ears.
There was a time to fuck, a time to bite the sound back, a time to dress and walk away.
He hadn't been aware that something had snuck its way beneath his skin, folding into the fissures of his hard exterior, resting just below the surface, causing him to itch and tear at his own skin; at the invisible ache that took residence in his chest. He hadn't known to be aware of such a feeling, hadn't taken the time to notice Mandy scratch at her own skin when the boy she loved went away to college, hadn't known that the patterns that danced up his mother's wrists, was her way of taking the itch out, the itch that his father had placed there. He hadn't known that this wasn't something to chase with alcohol, or something to avoid eyes over or to ignore.
There was a time to forget, a time to deny, a time to feel the itch.
No one had warned him that ignoring the itch, and letting it lie dormant against your rib cage, would cause time to slow down. He could feel bruises left by loving fingers, no longer discernible, ache terribly beneath his skin. The longer Mickey was alone, the more old marks would beat violently, drumming and bubbling through his veins, threatening to escape the leather-bound shell that was his body. And on some nights, if he was quiet enough and still enough, he would feel the latch of a ghost of a mouth against the nape of his neck silently marking him, hear the breathy words hot against his ear and for the first time in his life's entirety, he had no choice but to take the time to remember the small moments that he didn't nearly have enough of.
There was a time to remember, a time to feel, a time to wish for more.
Mickey may never have fully understood the concept of time, but he had always known that life was cruel and twisted and unexpected. He had known, the moment he had taken the time to peel off the layer of protective bullshit that had stuck to his bones and blackened his skin, that life would be waiting to deliver the next punch. But, he had been so enthralled by the freckles against the face that held the only pair of eyes that could stop his breath, distracted by the sweat caused by the delicious feeling that was skin against skin, taken by feeling that was to have the other part of your soul creep back into your rib cage; that he still didn't take the time to slow down the moments. Instead, Mickey, desperate, and biting, wanted to mark up all the alabaster skin writhing against him, wanted to mark, to possess. Because when you finally put two pieces together, they lock and shift until the boundaries of where one piece ends and the other begins become blurred and faded, and the longer you leave them the harder it is to take them apart.
There was a time to take, a time to rush, a time to mark.
No one had warned him about the silence. Not the comfortable, warm crackle of summer air between two people; the kind of silence that happens at 3 in the morning, when even the insects have gone to bed and the only thing still awake besides you is the heat that sticks to your skin, and the beats of silence that exist between the two of you. No, not that kind of silence, but the cold silence. The kind of silence that worms its way into your stomach, the kind that thunders blood past your ears so loudly, you can't remember if it was ever really silent to begin with. No one had told him about the grip that could take hold of someone's mind, twisting its reality, dulling out the lights. No one had warned him about the monster that would creep in one morning, quickly and with no warning, which was odd to him because he thought he had known all of them; these monsters that invade minds and take over your eyes. He knew of the anger that was the bottle and the desperation that was needing your next hit, he even knew of the restlessness that came from simply being from this neighborhood, but this was one monster Mickey did not know how to fight. How do you make your way into someone's mind to patch up the cracks and fractures without setting off a landmine? How do you rewire the circuit to turn the lights back on while making sure the same eyes will look at you when you do? No one had warned him. And so in this new uncomfortable silent space, Mickey waited. He could wait, soul bared, ears thundering, and heart no longer in his chest but in the hands of the body now a lump beneath the sheets, still and unmoving. He would wait.
After all, what was a little more time?