Ticking Clock, Unblinking Stars

I’m visiting her, staying with her, but it’s my only chance, my last chance with him. I wind around Manhattan with the other one, the one with the matching ring, heart beating into my throat, erratic to the point that my breath catches, that I’m nearly sick to my stomach with nerves. The hours tick down. The one with the ring drops me at her apartment with only an hour to spare, kisses me goodbye. I tell her I have to see him, and she sighs and says fine, be back by 11 and watches me step out in a tight dress and coral heels.

11 pm comes and goes in rounds of drinks. Don’t come back, she says, don’t stay with me again if you’re not staying with me. I wear his pajamas, crawl into his bed. And we sleep a foot apart. He reaches for me once in the night, but we never talk about it. I guess he figures I’m asleep, that I won’t notice one last touch. No one sleeps through electric shock. But we never talk about it because it doesn’t matter. I’m his history, he says as we step over the sleeping homeless in the dim pre-dawn. Him in his new suit, me in my tight dress and coral heels. History, the word echoes in my mind as we stare at each other between the uptown and downtown tracks, time clocks ticking. The first train comes and goes, I stand beside him to avoid those eyes. The eyes that tell me to kiss him even as his words assert the contrary. History. But it’s the perfect last kiss he wants. So we can end this. Closure. But a ring never closed it, and I won’t let a kiss. The clock flashes zero. We hug as the roaring train obliterates any words that could be said, should be said. Blocks rush between us, tears streak last night’s eyeliner, and the other passengers eye my coral heels, my slept-in makeup. And then the train platform is history too.

7 am, alone under the stars, ticking clock, alone in a whir of commuters, tourists, every person in the city with somewhere to go, somewhere to be, and no sense of history. Onward, the golden clock at the center of everything ticks only onward.

7 pm flight from JFK, she has my passport, my suitcase, locked away in an apartment from which I’ve been banned, and he didn’t kiss me goodbye. I stand at the center of it all, phone dying, my shallow apologies not going through, all the stars shining steadily overhead like real stars never do while Manhattan rushes around me in a blur, and I feel nothing at all.