When your body stands still, but beneath the surface, you feel the hum of life—the soft pulse of tingling bones, sparks whispering down your spine. The metallic taste of words unsaid lingers like a fork scraping your throat, while your heart, shaken but not yet shattered, beats to remind you that it still survives, somewhere beneath the weight of it all. You know you still exist because time presses its relentless hand upon you. The clock ticks in slow torment, each second pulling at your heart, unraveling it like loose thread, grinding your memories into ash. Forgotten, erased, replaced. Yet somehow, through the dust and the silence, you’re still here. We’re still here. Time hasn’t killed us yet.  

 

I think of the first time I saw you—the warmth of your smile, like the rising sun pushing back the edges of a long night. Back then, time didn’t weigh so heavily, it didn't stretch between us like an unspoken distance. We floated, untethered, above the worries of what was to come. But now we’re left sifting through the wreckage, searching for pieces of what we used to be. I want to wind us back—twist the hands of the clock and pull us from this chasm. Once, we stood together on skyscrapers, now we stumble on cracked stones, grasping at fragments of what we once were. I want to step closer to you, to remind you of what remains, even in the hollow spaces between. My heart, though weathered and slow, still beats toward yours. But what good is a clock without hands? What good is a heart that can no longer find its rhythm? We keep moving, but we’ve lost the sense of when we’ll find each other again.  

 

Sometimes, I dream of you. In those dreams, we are whole again. The air is warm, filled with the scent of rain on pavement, you look at me the way you once did—like I was something precious, a part of you you’d never let slip away, as if losing me would unravel everything you held together. But morning always comes too quickly, pulling us apart with the cruel light of day. Let us dissolve into each other, bleed into the places where time has scarred us. Distance has stretched us thin, left us wandering between silence and the weight of everything unsaid. But let’s return to the days when we created without effort, when we didn’t have to fabricate anything just to feel alive. We’ll keep turning, winding, running, our hearts still beating, our breaths heavy from the weight of unspoken screams.  

 

The world outside keeps moving—people bustling through their routines, time marching on without a second thought. But here, in the quiet space between us, I wait. Give me something, anything, across the distance that separates us. Show me that this isn’t nothing, that we haven’t been erased by time. We feared nothing more than becoming ghosts of ourselves—forgotten, replaced, erased. But let me retrace the lines of your fingers, feel them lace with mine once more, like the hands of a clock finding their place. There is still time. We can crush the broken path beneath us, grind the dust into our palms as we piece together what’s left. Let’s return to the road we never thought we’d leave, where time slowed for us, and each tick…tock… reminded us of everything we’ve built, and everything still waiting to be built.  

 

We’ll be fragile—cracked, but not broken—standing in the light of a new day. Our shadows will stretch across the horizon, merging as the sun rises. Wake me again at six a.m., your fingers grazing mine like whispers in the quiet dawn, sending shivers through the parts of me that still remember. Together, we’ll marvel at the sunrise we thought we’d never see, our silhouettes entwined like the hands of a clock, spinning gently back to life. Time will slow for us again, and we will know that we’ve always been enough—that we’ve always been here, waiting, with no need to let go.