The man who wound the watch

We did the divorce badly. The lawyers, the long silences, eating dinner in separate rooms of a house we both still slept in. For years I needed you to be the villain of it, because tidy was about all I could manage back then.

Then last week I unpacked a box that's followed me through three apartments and there it was. Your watch. The steel one. Still ticking. You always did wind it.

So I wound it. First time in twenty years anybody has, and it started straight up, like it had just been sitting in the dark being patient. Like that was a thing it knew how to do and had been doing the whole time without me.

I'm old enough now to say the true thing instead of the tidy one. There was never a villain. You were easy to love and I made it hard on purpose, because being right felt safer than being soft, and I was a coward about precisely one thing in my whole life and it was you. You held my hand through my mother's funeral. You made the coffee every morning we were married and I never once said thank you out loud.

I'm not going to send this. I just needed it to exist somewhere. The watch is on the windowsill where the morning light gets it. It can keep the time for the both of us now.