Midnight Bird
I didn’t think it’d be important all these years later… the graveyard silence of a 2 am house, the squeaky floorboards so unlike the steady infrastructure of the homes I grew up in, or the fire engine red clock that mocked me from up on its pedestal.
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Some years earlier, I was a cheerleader uniform and a couple stacks of honor roll certificates. He and I were a Disney movie about high school: the captain of the football team and a varsity cheerleader. We shuffled around all the places we weren’t supposed to be, stealing time we thought we were owed. We were teenagers after all; wasn’t the world supposed to be ours? That’s what all the movies and shows told us anyway. So we took the time we thought was ours, thinking it would be infinite. But there were always hands holding the time, the clock that clucked the minutes away, hanging like a sentence on his bedroom wall. I still remember the silence of his empty house. It was always an empty house, save for him and I and the ticking clock.
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Here we were again, the silence and I, but in a new house with a new boy and his fire engine red clock hanging above the bathroom door. It’s funny how you never hear the ticking hands until you’re alone with them.
I always thought hands were meant to be gentle. Hands were soft. They were protective and caring, like that of a father or a mother. I suppose it's hands, too, that commit the most heinous of acts. But the clock hands had no intention; they were a neutral party. They could carry no fault or blame, even as they watched and passed judgement.
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I would often wake in the middle of the night in that little house in Alameda. The floorboards would announce me at every step, and so I’d tiptoe across the room, blowing like a feather in the wind. My mother used to say I could never be a spy because of how loudly I walked. Well, she’d never seen me there, walking like a whisper.
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At midnight, the clock sang a tune over my panicked breathing. ‘Shhh, everyone is sleeping!’ he urged.
If he wasn’t so determined to be right, to be honest all the time, maybe I could’ve been quiet. But unlike the clock, the ticking lies I told myself were silent.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------The bathroom floor was cold beneath my bare feet, and at this hour, my whole life felt like teetering dominoes. Tick Tick Tick. That damned clock I was sure would open a portal to another world. Tick Tick Tick. It mocked me. Tick Tick Tick.
It’s been so long since that time, and my heart is a dud in my chest now…but then it was a tornado siren for barren winds that only ever came in my mind. The red clock and I, we hallucinated tales as I sat on the bathroom floor, certain I’d blink and find that my lover had forgotten me, fearful that I’d dreamed it all up.
I should have known.
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Perhaps I’ve had more great loves than I can say, but only three that most would bother to count. Two were haunted by the authoring hand I was naive to be blind to. It left red herrings, a ticking clock.
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Dear Clock,
You were right.
Sincerely,
The future I feared, and the one you dreamed.
P.S. The ticking clock has struck out like a midnight bird; now all that’s left is an hourglass and its settled sand.