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.

On unwanted healing.

Once there was a part of me that fell in love with concepts, with potentials, with the insides of minds I only barely got to see. I made mix tapes in the dark and wrote letters I never sent. Once, I knitted my dreams into a scarf. It’s half-finished, gathering dust, and I don't know where. If I ever finish it, I might wear it myself, just to prove a point. But that part has gone away, to parts unknown, and it didn’t leave a note.

I lost the part of me that wrote poetry in my sleep, the one that devoted every spare moment to dreaming. It wore away somewhere in between the dashboard of his car and the cold air of his garage. If I looked, I think I would find pieces of it tangled in their Christmas lights, in the way I looked in their mirror. Traces would be found on wooden floors in the middle of the woods. It’s tangled in his hair somewhere, caught in the chain of her necklace, on the fabric of his grandmother’s quilt. It drifts up in the smoke of his pipe in the small apartment bathroom, in the clouds of mint smoke from a long-shattered hookah.

I am trying to find it. I’m digging for it in the footprints I leave outside of his cabin. I search for it in the whorls of his ceiling, and find only faces that look like the ones that flow in ink and color from my brother’s hands. This is you. I thought maybe I’d find it in the Boykin spaniel’s golden eyes, in the griffins on the backs of his calves. There are times I think I’ve come close: his head pressed on my chest to hear my heartbeat as he touches me, our voices vibrating through the springs of his mattress in the dark, the way his pulse is the strongest I have ever heard, and I don’t even have to be touching him to feel it.

But I’m starting to think the piece will always be missing now. There are times I reach inside myself to find it and feel something that’s like new skin over old wounds. I feel like I lost a key to a lock I hadn’t yet found, and when I reach it, I will be barred, stuck forever on the wrong side of a gate I never knew I needed to open. I wonder if I gave myself away too early, if I was supposed to ration the love songs and heatbreak so I had some left to give when I finally learned how.

I look for songs to break myself open later, ones that will remind me of fire-heated rooms and long nights full of cigarettes and too much Diet Coke. I look for the lyrics that will remind me of the smell of bourbon and thunderstorm cologne and the cold air of mid-winter. I can’t find it. Not a single song clicks home.

I cast my net out for the memory that will belong to him, months from now. The one I will remember when I think of him, the way I remember music on a ratty couch and a hand on my shoulder as a fire blazes. Every time, I come up empty, and I am afraid. I’m afraid to forget, but more than that, I’m afraid I’ve numbed myself to the urge to remember, to cling to details like lifelines, proof like carvings in my heart to remind myself, This was real.

I wonder what it means to know that I would rather have that broken place, full of all its shattered memories, than to lose it and all the things it held

As the ice thins, so does your certainty.

The prodigal son returns to you as you sit in a cabin in the woods. Two months ago, you gave away his medallion to the brother who stayed. When you cry on the line to your best friend, you find yourself wondering if you will ever actually pick up the phone to call him. You have lost him so many times—surely there comes a point where lost things should remain that way, forever floating in if-onlys and the mistakes you wish neither of you had made.

- - -

The man you're seeing—the ravens' wings—is more like the tide than anyone you've ever met, and you wonder what it means that you have always been so attracted to the ocean. Sometimes you think you've never met anyone better. Others, you're certain you are destined to fall for the people who don't fit you in just the right way.

You find yourself crying at the foot of his bed at 4 AM, and, like so many other times, your mind is pulled back to the boy with the kokopelli tattooed on the worst of the scars on his left wrist. He once held you as you cried at the end of his bed and told you not to be afraid. Until a few weeks ago, you thought you would somehow end up spending the rest of your life with him. Now, you are only nineteen and confused. You have no destiny, and the red thread you have been following through the dark has reached its frayed and broken end. The kokopelli boy is not there to meet you. He never was.

The ravens' wings asks what' wrong, and you words catch in your throat.

I miss believing in a god, you try to say. I miss when I thought I wasn't going to end up alone like my mother, filled with delusions like my father. I miss thinking there were forces in the world that cared. But even you have to admit that isn't all of it, not really. As you lay on your stomach on his bed, head in your hands, you try to tell him that you miss the feeling of wanting to be alive. You have never felt this happy and this empty at the same time. It's a hint, as if you ever needed it, that you are destined for this for as long as you're alive—discontent and unrest, and happiness that never quite reaches the places it's trying to heal.

An hour and a couple cigarettes later, you turn off the light and go back to bed, because it's easier than trying to explain this to your barely-lover, and you're not sure you can stand the desperate attempts to make you laugh much longer. Besides, sleep is better than sitting there and wanting to be dead.

- - -

Your chosen brother weighs heavily on your mind for days. You still have yet to pick up the phone. Part of you wants to, the way it always has. It's the part of you that felt that you would always be okay, if only you could find him and talk to him. It's the part of you that was born in a room full of holes, of paper wristband, of Enya played too fast on an out-of-tune piano.

The rest of you is not so sure. You're afraid of hearing the drugs in his voice again. Or, maybe worse, you're afraid he will be entirely sober, and entirely unfamiliar. You're not sure you could handle that, not while you're spending most of your time sleeping to keep the thoughts of pills and sharp things at bay.

If you're being honest with yourself, he has always been the one person in your life with total power to break you, and you have spent six years letting him, in one way or another. Your walls are stronger now than they were the last time this happened, and you know you will never be in love with him again, but you think that if anyone could tear you down to nothingness, it would be him.

You stare at his number in your phone for a long time, but you don't press the button. You flip it closed and swap inane videos with the ravens' wings instead.

Sometimes it's easier to just let things continue as they are. You think, If there's a brick wall at the end of this straightaway, at least I'll have an excuse to be a little broken.

Yes, sometimes it's easier to let things continue as they are, even if that's full of a muted pain in your chest and tears that come without warning. Even if that means lying through your teeth to every other person you have to speak to. Even if it means you've started not being able to leave your bedroom without makeup for the first time in years. After all, continuation, however mediocre, is better than the alternative.

And that's what you tell yourself every time you realize, all over again, that you want to die.

So far, it's working.