The Unreliable Clock

I have never forgotten the birth times of my loved ones.

They think it’s because I care about them. That’s true, but it’s not the main reason.

The moment that it becomes a loved one’s birthday, the clock becomes enlarged in my mind, ticking in my ear with incessant anxiety. My throat is stuffed with a watch-sized lump. And my stomach is filled with ticking hands going round and round.

Logically, it’s all imaginary.

Illogically, my loved ones will die if I miss their birth time, even by a minute.

The illogical holds more power over me. The illogical always takes up more space than simple facts. It’s not bound by rules, so it swells, engorging itself on the facts.

I sit with my finger poised over the send button. In a few minutes, it will be Andrew’s birth time. 3:00am. It’s a beautiful birth time, really. One of my perfect numbers. 3, 6, but not 9. It’s too close to 10. 12 is good, but perilously close to 13. 33 is better than perfect.

The room is expectantly quiet so that I can hear the slightly off tick of the clock on the wall. I know that it’s off because I have my watch set to the perfect second. The clock ticks lacklusterly after my watch. It sits nestled between the glassy eyes of two deer heads. There is a slight imperfection in the left eye of the left deer, where a wayward dart skimmed past to land in the soft fur.

In his prime, my grandfather would have noticed instantly. Age has muddled his hunter eyes. He sits now in his armchair, learning his head back, the top of his head speckled like the skin of a ripe banana, dusted with white hairs. A finger wraps around the handle of a chipped grey mug, as if he’s preventing it from being ripped away by a sudden wind.

My grandmother sits in her own armchair across the room. She has been spewing words for the last ten minutes like a teapot left on the stove too long. They sizzle past her lips, landing on ears that have long been numbed to the heat.

My foot taps irregularly on the dark blue carpet, my big toe hitting directly on a 2012 coffee stain.

The final second ticks over 59, then lags, shivering in place. I hit send on my phone, but it stays loading. My eyes flick to the time at the top, and a shiver runs through me. 2:60.

I look back at my watch. All the hands are shivering. I look at the clock on the wall. It shivers in sync. My body is shaking now as well. I am so focused on the buzzing within my own mind that it takes another few seconds, which I automatically tick using my tongue, to realize that my grandparents are speaking.

Their voices ring with the cadence of much younger people. My grandfather leans forward in the arm chair, briskly pushing down the footrest, then strides to my grandmother, giving her a strong embrace. She clutches the soft skin hanging from his arms, her eyes squeezing shut.

“I have missed you, my love,” she whispers.

“As have I,” he responds, giving her furrowed forehead a long kiss.

“Oh,” she says, taking his face in her steady hands. “How your face has changed! This year must have been difficult.”

“You are as beautiful as ever,” he responds with a grin.

She runs a thumb over his thick eyebrows, pushing the deep furrows apart. “How much time do you think our bodies have left?”

“I can feel my bones withering,” he says with a sigh that seems to flutter through the room. “This may be our last year.”

She drapes herself against his shoulder, tears glistening in her eyes. “I look forward to infinite hours together, but I will miss your body.”

My body has stilled, an odd feeling, like reverence, sitting warmly on my chest. It feels wrong to speak, as if I were to interrupt a ritual.

They speak to each other gently as I stand up, tiptoeing to the window. My breath collects on the glass as my nose almost touches the glass. The road outside, normally as subdued and mellow as the warm marsh that lies parallel to it, is filled with movement. People embracing, as if they have just returned from a war in which they were unlikely to survive. Cries of joy coming from mouths that previously creaked with disuse.

I see Janice, the 102 year old neighbor, her silk robe fluttering around her spindly body as she runs for Alison, whose blue-veined skin is oddly ethereal under the dim streetlights. They embrace as a tetris of fragile limbs.

The two have been neighbors for decades, best friends for life. Some say that they’re more than that, but few would conspire such a story in Savannah, Georgia. Janice and Alison complain about each other to anyone who will listen, or even to the air if it feels particularly receptive. Janice about Alison’s insistence that takeout is better left on the counter for days. Alison about Janice’s hobby of saving hundreds of jars that she thinks will eventually come to use. Both facts that I did not memorize willingly. Rather, they’re like an annoying song heard repeatedly in grocery stores until the lyrics are dutifully engrained.

I don’t see anyone alone. Other than myself.

I’m always alone. Normally, and now, in this…I don’t know what this is. I just know that it’s not normal.

But something is different within myself. I feel a leaping creature within my chest, throwing itself against the tendons and muscles with the desperation of a mother whose child is in grave danger. My heart beats steadily, ostentatiously, in response. Tick, tock, tick, tock…

My grandparents still don’t notice me, whispering sweet nothings that seem to be sweet everythings to the people I have always believed to be bound together simply by the mistake of marriage and Catholic obstinance. Their married life has been perfunctory, the rules seeming to be taken from a bible made up of blackout poetry.

Love is a foolish mistake. Marriage is what holds you accountable for that mistake.

I don’t make mistakes, least of all the ones accompanied by rules. Rules take your life and knot it into a Gordian knot, so impossible to untangle that the only way to start over is to cut yourself in half.

And yet, I feel a shrinking within myself. What once seemed large has cowered in the shadow of something much bigger. Some part of myself, larger than the visible, that I suddenly feel as if I have known of its existence my entire life, and even before my life.