Unbottling Time.

Simple and elegant, they are precision timepieces artfully crafted in silver and platinum with crystal settings and slivered hands. They are beautiful. 

And I hate them.

I’ve never been particularly fond of watches. I toyed with the idea of them, committing myself for brief interludes before setting them aside to gather dust. Expensive shackles, watches weighed heavily on my tiny wrists and my mind.

And yet my life demanded that I count time. Endless meetings that ran over and into each other, midnight feedings that became midnight terrors, frantic runs squeezed in between rush hour and the dinner hour, lunch hours lost to doctor’s appointments, errands and groceries, phone calls unanswered and letters unwritten. While my husband’s clock was simple and straightforward, mine was erratic and unyielding.

After he died, I counted time—24 hours, 48 hours, seven days, one month, 90 days, six months, one year, 18 months—as though I was measuring the time that I had left, not the time since he had left me. A life on hold because he had left it.

And then I stopped counting.

I sifted slowly through the remains of the life we had lived, turning from the past and toward an unwritten future with each passing moment and each closed box. A life on hold suddenly became a life to be lived, and a clock that was once erratic and unyielding became mine to unwind. I wished less for the past and longed more for a future and I wondered who and what were yet to come.

As I close the last boxes and step into the future I want, I know.

It’s been there all along, waiting for the time to be right.