The Worth of One Extra Hour

When I collect the pennies and nickels of the minutes we spent together, it truly adds up to quite a hefty sum...but why is it now...now in these days that spread thin across many weeks that I feel like the one deficit that I truly have is the inability to spend time with you.

The way time speeds when you are kiss-close; the way it drags when you can barely even speak to me and your correspondence is a few conservative words that probably scared you to even write.

Time was never our friend...but it was our favorite part when together...usually measured in minutes but sometimes longer.

It feels like something I can no longer give you...and something you'd prefer not to part with.

I imagine if we were in the past...when we could sit in a car and listen to a radio while the rest of the world went to sleep...we'd talk..about things we worried about, things we dreamed about...a commercial coming on and then back to music...and mostly I like to think we'd sit silent.  Just grateful for the shape of you next to me...near...and just giving me your time.  Nothing else, and that would be all that I would want.

Or if we sat high in a city...the lights spread out across us....a drink before us.  Time was in the taillights of the taxis...the changing of the street lights.  It wasn't impacting us...it was just reminding us that while we were together the rest of the place kept moving on.

The time I spend away from you is heavy and dark...the time with you is bubble-gum pink and cotton-candy thin...it is so unfair.

But it is to be expected.

So given the ability to stop time tonight, for just an hour and then relive it as we set clock backs in some well-worn ritual, I wish that if I had the ability to spend any extra hour in any way then you would realize it would be to spend it with you.

In whatever shape or form that might be...listening to gaps of silence on a phone, sitting on the edge of a porch watching fireflies...on the cold banks of the Atlantic as it grays in the winter...in the post-peak stand of trees in the south when the leaves are mostly brown and crunchy...in an early morning that is increasingly darker and now that any daylight that we had saved is gone.

Time does that.  Distance does that.  Together...well...I just feel like I've run out of both.