Somewhere, someplace, you were on a mantle, an antique eagle clock with gold crested hours. The decor wore with time, but you swore that it kept the present where your past should be, and you liked it that way. Arachnids spun satin dressed homes from your features to your hands; your focus waned as clouds of infant spiders waltzed across your eyes– the only life I’d seen in them in years. You’d never had a gut instinct, just filth and a steady meter. Even dust shied away from those hands, unseen and incapable of settling on such rusted things.

You had a peculiar way of replaying yourself each morning. Always, you would hold the same face when the flimsy jacklight of tree swings and birds of summer cast silhouettes and promise through the open window panes. Always, the same face when winter drank in the last of buttered grass and soft snow fortified its fatal caress on the last of the tree moths. Always, the same face, like you never believed in anything.

Patience was an understatement. We’d spend many a night in silence with an exquisite understanding of pattern in time; I never minded much. I knew that as long as your golden numbers still shimmered silver in the dark, we’d be alright. But there were so many things internal, such a dizziness I could never find quite the way to wind. I wish I could’ve saved you somehow, packed you somewhere safe to take you out on a landlocked day.

                You were a beautiful antique, but oh, so very, very tattered...  

I was always told that I could have traded you for a newer, working clock. I never would have even considered, until the day your ticking stopped.