Three sheets of blank paper sat on my desk Sunday. One by one they’ve been filled. Ratcoher easy to fill the first two. Not easy to write, I mean, I wasn’t stifling giggles while composing them, but after a few minutes, I pretty much knew what I wanted to say. Your page, though, has been mocking me for the past 72 hours. Daring me to put something down on it. A paragraph. A sentence. Measly fragment. Hell, a definite article.

Nothing coming. Couldn’t figure out how to start, didn’t know which way to go, and sure as hell didn’t know the end. Might as well have been Helen Keller running the Boston Marathon. Deaf dumb and blind boy, here in my own vibration land. See me, feel me…Well, you can do neither, being so far away. Probably wouldn’t want you to anyways, even if you were still here. Some days I’m not so sure. Usually pretty resolved.

So yea, was a bit lost. The blank page, threatened with coffee stains, buried under the new edition of “Blender”, buddying up with the phone bill. It would have been the one constant if you’d done a time-lapse shot of my desk over the past few days. Needing to be filled, this piece. Just couldn’t figure out what to fill it with, what to talk about. I guess I still don’t. Then again, maybe I never will.

The second: Citizen. Steel. Wouldn’t dare get it wet; I saw the price tag. Drove the lady at the store nuts trying to figure out its clasp mechanism. Poor woman thought I had rode the short bus to the department store. I all but gave the watch a suplex in the store.

I figured out the clasps of each eventually. Some things I guess I still haven’t figured out.

The Fossil came first. Lasted a few years. Vaguely glow-in-the-dark, though I don’t think it was intentional. A big boy watch, you said. No more calculator built in, no more phone number storage. No LED screen, an honest-to-God watch that didn’t even have numbers at the hours.

Citizen came second. Even more impressive than the first. Looked great at first. Black face, silver hands, light band. Out with the old, in with the new. Long overdue for a new watch.

The Fossil, you see, started to fray after a few months. The clasp, which I had finally mastered, seemed to weld itself shut every time I’d put it on. It didn’t help of course that I bite my nails. But I consistently had to make sure I had some vague form of a fulcrum around to get that bad boy off me at night. To top it off, the finally links, the ones on either side of the watch face…well, they came loose from their pins. Never came fully off, mind you. Always hung on for dear life. But they formed sharp, jagged points at each end, forming a four-fingered talon, ready to strike.

They struck you in bed one night, when I forgot to take it off. You bled slightly from the forearm after I tried to spoon with you.

We went to get the Citizen a week later.

Out with the old, in with the new.

An anniversary present, that’s what it was. From you to me. I needed a proper watch, you said. I deserved a new watch, you said. And you would be there to pick it out, just as “she who shall not be named” had picked out the Fossil. Only this time, I had a say. Or so I thought. I always surrendered to you on points of style. I surrendered to you on many occasions for many inferior reasons, but in terms of style and culture, I gladly accepted your superiority. This watch, THIS one…that was the one you wanted to get.

What we saw is not what we got, however. Never had the guts to tell you this (well, really, I had more than common sense than anything else), but I really couldn’t read this watch very well. In broad daylight, under a florescent light, hey all, good. But anytime it was dark, or even semi-dark, well, it was impossible to determine the time. Consistently found myself searching for a scrape of light to learn the time.

I never knew the right time. The Citizen died a few months ago. Battery stopped. Time of death: 11:50 and 39 seconds. Not sure if it was AM or PM. Doesn’t matter. I still don’t know the right time.

Don’t know if this is the right time to write you. Right time to start dating again. Right time to pick up my gear and get out of Boston. Right time to figure out what I want to actually DO with my life. Ticking away, the moments that make up a dull day...

Used to be easier. 9 am: Time to get to work. 12:30 pm: Time to eat lunch. And at some point, on good days, you’d tell me when you were free. And then that became our time. That time made sense. Didn’t have to be special, it was just time. Time together.

The watch ticked away all the time we weren’t spending together in the months after you left. Blissfully unaware. Relentlessly moving forward. I kept it on because, well, time didn’t stop once we did. It only felt like it at times. You need a watch, though. Functional. Practical.

Practical. Not a romantic word, but an important word for our romance. Living a life of practicality can pretty much kill a relationship. Killed ours, in part. We had a great hand in it ourselves, to be sure. Not enough always to care. Not always enough to love. Not nearly enough, in our case.

Hard to swallow. Hard to understand. We’re all raised on movies where the music swells at just the right point, uniting or reuniting a couple at certain moments. And then you get to the point in your own life where the invisible jukebox is supposed to kick in, and all you can hear is the occasional rumble of a motor on the street below. Kinda sucks the life out of the moment. Can kill your sense of relentless romanticism.

The watch has a purpose, has a place, has a definite location. You and I, well, we had none of those luxuries. For a while, our lives intertwined, but it looks like that was more of a happy coincidence. And then, at some point, we weren’t on the same path. Still mostly parallel, but you could see the ever-widening gap in the horizon, if you looked. We never really did. Every once in a while, I’d tell you to take a peek, but you just wanted to look at me. I liked the way you looked at me, so I wouldn’t press the issue.

That was the thing. Man, I’d forgotten until now. Rushing to the surface hard, though. You’d do this thing, where you’d look at me in this way, and I knew I couldn’t possibly do anything wrong for at least 90 seconds, which for my neuroses is quite the lengthy time. And usually your arms would find their way around my waist, and you’d say, “Hugggzzzzzzzz” and I’d give you a bear hug, and since we were 8 seconds into my period of grace, I’d give a really good one.

And that’s what I’d always tell people when they asked what it was like to be with you.

And what I’d tell myself every time we were into a 90-hour period of darkness, anger, bitterness, and accusation. Those 90 seconds could feel like 90 hours, but the reverse was never true. Time’s funny, that way.

Time slipped by, in those last few months. The gap had widened to the point where Neo couldn’t leap over it. We played it ignorant, and then pretended we dealt with it. And then, a few days later, we really did deal with it. Romance and practicality dance together with four left feet, and well, we left more than simply bruised toes that night. According to my watch, it lasted roughly 22 minutes. Years dissolved in less time than it takes to watch a sitcom.

I still have the Citizen. Sits on my dresser. A picture of you still sits on my desk at work. Can’t bring myself to throw either away. Both are moments, frozen in time, tied to you. Discarding them can’t discard you.

I wear the Fossil now, weirdly enough. Mom found it in a drawer back in May. Found it a few days after the Citizen died. Still has its talon. Still has a heartbeat. So do you. So do I. Time marches on, somehow, someway.

Doing stuff was never my thing. Still isn’t my thing. I don’t miss the things we did, I miss simply the time that I could spend with you. I’m not sure you ever got that. $100 dinner, drive through taken back to my apartment, didn’t matter. Boat cruise or walk to Harvard Square. Coulda cared less. That was our time. And now that time has stopped.

I have no idea how your spend your time these days. I don’t think you much care how I spend mine. Most of our mutual friends don’t seem to know what you’re up to, either, although they have great poker faces, so who knows. I fill up days as best I can, and mostly, I’m surprised to see a day, or a week, or sometimes a month has gone by. Time can fly pretty fast.

At the best moments with you, time stood still. And atop my dresser, there’s a constant reminder of that fact. I’d like to keep that reminder, if it’s alright by you. Time’s moving forward for both of us, that’s a cold hard fact. But I’d like to keep a little bit of it in stasis, just for a little while longer. Maybe you’re doing the same. I wonder.