Time limits are the world's way of saying, "Please, pay attention."

You wake me up at five-thirty to chicken and garlic pasta. I've been asleep most of the day, and in any other place at any other time, I'd be filled with dark cobwebs, wrestling with the emptiness of a mostly-wasted day and the desire to succumb to the ease of slipping back into sleep. Instead, as your dog hops up on the bed to give me a belated good morning sniff, I slide out from the covers. You pour me wine, and as we sit with full stomachs and cigarettes afterward, I have a thought that is becoming increasingly frequent and exponentially more pressing. This is too good to be true.

It's not, not really—the food in my stomach and the warmth of the fireplace tell me that—but when you leave, I hear the ticking of the clock. You keep it in your mother's old secretary desk, the one you held for your brother in a storage unit after she died, and when you're out in the snow for wood with your canine companion, it seems incredibly loud. I try not to look at my watch or the clock on your wall, try to forget that the days are slipping towards spring and towards the day I will pack up all my belongings, load them into the back of your truck, and take the last drive down the highways, away from my northern haven and back to the place I lived the last time I felt like this.

There is always a deathclock for lovers, I tell myself. You just happen to always be able to hear it.

Still, as I try not to memorize the patterns on your ceiling and the way the wind sounds outside, the ticking of that clock seems very, very loud.

- - -

The night I tell you about the scientist, and the way he took advantage of me, you get angry. Not at me, I know, but either at the idea in general or the scientist himself. I keep you awake until six, half-yelling in the dark and trying not to shake. You search for my hand and hold it, and I think that you might be the first person I've been with since him to actually understand how often he enters my mind.

A few days later, the kokopelli boy sends me an article on the Steubenville rape case that you already read to me. There is no comment, no note, nothing, and it is the first thing he's said to me in two months. I stare at it, dumbfounded, wondering what he's trying to say, and if he thinks current events are really the way to get me to answer him after a year and a half being in love with him and almost three months of stone-cold silence.

Does he want a gold star for being a decent person? I wonder. For understanding rape culture? For knowing how much I hate it? Well it'll take more then social commentary from someone else to get me to decide to talk to him after he told me he wasn't sure our friendship was even worth the effort.

For the next few days, though, I find myself marveling at the circle I've gone in. Here I am again, finally happy and counting the days until I leave it all. Soon, my days with you will be even with the days I had with him. Don't think about it, I tell myself. This isn't the same. There is so much difference here.

And there is, but as I sit in my dorm room with too much time on my hands and no warm touches to break the monotony, I swear I can hear the clock ticking away on the shelf of your desk, miles away.

- - -

“I thought I was done with sex before I met you,” you tell me.

I try not to laugh and probably fail. “I'm sorry?”

“No, don't be. It's a good thing.”

And it is, again and again. You told me once that I have an easy on switch, and I laugh about it, but I wonder if you can tell how easily that on-switch is turned off, and how much it takes for me to trust you the way I do, to always leave my defenses down. I have never been afraid of you, never had to pull myself back to Earth just in case. When you press your thumbs into my hips, I don't feel strange about letting you know how perfect that is, or adjusting your grip the way I would if I was digging bruises into my own skin. When you steal my breath, pressing your hand over my throat, I'm not thinking of proving myself to you, or of what the woman you usually sleep with would think of me.

At one point, we fuck twice, and fall asleep naked. This is the first time I've slept naked next to anyone since the scientist—the first time I've felt safe enough to. Right before I drift off, I hear the clock ticking steadily away, counting the seconds until I'll have to start thinking about how hard it will be to leave you behind and start all over. Maybe you don't have to, I find myself thinking. Maybe there's a way to—

But I cut that thought off before it finishes. The last time I decided to fight fate, I spent a year and a half sleepless and ripping my heart in half every few days. This is different, part of me insists, and I think it's that very heart, scarred and still bleeding sometimes over a confused and battered guitarist halfway across the country. This is new.

But the clock is still ticking, and when we wake up later, I still can't bring myself to admit what it means that I am so intent on denying its sound.

When we sleep for real that night, and your breathing turns deep and heavy next to me, I find myself spelling all the things I can't say with the hand not tangled with yours, over and over in letters you can't see or understand.

I wonder if I will ever say them aloud, or if I've finally learned that no amount of emotion, no matter how strong, fixes expiration dates.

The deathclock is still ticking, and I am still leaving. Still, despite all of that, I am happy—then and now, here or next to you, and I am hoping that will be enough in the night to remind me that the second-hand means nothing compared to yours.