parallelograms of light

I'm in love with K's watch.

He has this measured way of speaking which forces me to go slow when I want to go fast. I can't decide whether this is because he is a person who likes to think about what he's saying before he says it or if it's because we are not communicating in his native tongue. When I convince myself it's the former I'm overwrought with envy because I would love to have this kind of control over my mouth. When I think it's the latter, I think about the fact that my first language is all but gone and I wonder if he still thinks in Dutch.

Instead of asking him about why he doesn't wear the watch inside the house, I decided to just ask him if I could see it. I feel like I've been trying not to touch it my whole life. He said I could have it. He did not mean have, he meant I could hold it in my hands which I did as soon as he went upstairs.

I've never seen a watch like this. It's heavy, so heavy, and the bracelet part bit my the inside of my wrist the second I put it on. The face is glass both on the front and on the back so you can see the inner mechanism from either side. There's no face plate, just metal pieces that revolve around each other perfectly. I feel like I could almost understand what time means. It says Grönefeld around the perimeter of the face.

I was still wearing the watch when K came back downstairs and so I handed it back to him, but he just put it on the kitchen table. Then he told me that he can't remember what his wife looks like. He doesn't say ex-wife. I told him I can't remember what Shawn looks like either because he takes too long in the shower, and then I felt a wave of regret because it sounded like I was being flippant but I wasn't. I just meant this kind of memory, memory of faces, is based on recognition and not on recall. No one really remembers what anyone looks like when they're not there. Do they?

I picked up the watch again. It's four thirty, I said, Look - it's still light.


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