Sometimes I Wonder If Time Will Bring Us Back Together Again

Sometimes I get lost thinking about time. How the clock keeps ticking, no matter our efforts to pause it. How seconds sometimes feel like they draw on, and other times speed by so fast you hardly feel them. How strange it is that a day can feel so long, so tiring, so slow, but then you look back and realize an entire month has passed with a blink of an eye.

Sometimes I get confused thinking about time. How time dances with circumstance and place, brings two strangers together in a dizzying two-step, has them bump into one another and step on one another’s toes and suddenly the way two bodies have navigated this earth as separate entities makes no sense anymore.

Because in those fleeting seconds, fate has shifted.
Because their clocks have synced.
Because suddenly they’re dancing to a new rhythm.

And time seems to both slow down and rush simultaneously.

That’s the only explanation I have for love—fate and timing. Two people with their own stories and paths and lives intertwining in a matter of seconds. Place and circumstance. Destiny and desire. Suddenly they’re no longer two separate people, two separate bodies, but have joined in that moment and become something more.

Love is incredible, really. How we suddenly find bits of ourselves in other people. How we close our eyes and cannot imagine a world without them in it, as if we haven’t been alive until we saw their face.

I love knowing that time, though it never stops, has the power to bring two people together.

And sometimes I wonder if it has the power to do that all over again, with us.

We were a product of time, a product of place, a product of two broken relationships and a hunger to know someone so different than us. We were a fleeting moment in a crowded room of people. We were unintentional laughs, smiles shared across a messy table.

We were infinite, tiny moments of time—and we became love.

But our time ran out.

We wanted different things, different lives, different dreams. We faded like a tired clock in the back of a dusty room, the minute hand slowly dragging on until it finally ceased.

And I can’t help but wonder how our timing could stop when the rest of the watches continued forward. When the rest of the world took no notice of our hearts breaking, and those clocks kept ticking, no thoughts of us at all.

When I close my eyes, I can still feel the way you used to touch me. How you’d put your hand on the small of my back and guide me through a crowded room, or rest your fingers on my hip and pull my sleeping body towards yours so gently, so carefully.

I still remember the way your voice sounds, even after all this time. And that amazes me. Because there are only a few things that time doesn’t steal in its wake. And I never thought the sound of your voice would be something I could keep.

Sometimes I get lost thinking about time. How two people could find one another in the craziness, in the continuance, and yet, somehow fall into rhythm. How they could find their way apart, even after their clocks were so connected.

And how, and if, they could ever find that same ticking beat again.

Sometimes I wonder if time will ever bring us back together. Now that so much has passed, now that we’re in different worlds, now that we’ve been apart for so long—maybe we could fall back into old patterns. Maybe we’re watches with the second-hand just a little off-beat.

Maybe all we need are new batteries to sync with one another again.

But time continues, it rushes, it slows.

It used to seem so endless with you. Then so endless without you. And now, it seems steady, right in line with the beating of my heart.

And I keep wondering, in these quiet seconds, if that beat will ever quicken with the rhythm of yours again.