The Wristwatch
Growing up in a house without the time, I remember time clearly. So clearly, in fact, that if I look down, I’m sure I’ll see a watch tattooed with the exact time on my wrist. Big hand just past the three, small hand partially over the five. But who needs a watch to remember that? That tick-tick-tick malarkey is pure child’s play. A watch doesn’t do any good, just like a set of keys opening the front door after three in the morning. When did it ever?
No matter how much I twist that little hand back, or ignore the repetition of its movement, I realise nothing will ever bring him back. My Dad, I mean. Every time I check my watch, a little more of him disappears from my memory, as if he’s a small piece of land battered by tides. He loses focus, submerged further and further under water. Memories refract and reshape; I remember odd details. His pale blue training shoes with a white stripe running around the base. His green and red tartan can opener that only worked when he tilted the beer bottle horizontally, like pouring a pint glass. The taut gold band around his fourth finger, two gold chunks in his molars, and a large hunk of metal buried beneath his hip flesh. A dirtied plaster over the bridge of his nose.
I was very young, you see. What I can remember often only comes when I sit and think for hours, straining my head onto the verge of an ache. It feels fundamentally screwed that I can sit here, a living, breathing person, and fifty percent of my being I owe to a man that I only remember with a broken nose. And a couple of dental fillings. I didn’t biologically inherit those things, nor does my knowing their existence bring me any closer to him. There aren’t enough bridges on this earth to ever bring me close enough.
Mum tells me all the time that my dad was very much a part of nature. All patterned and truly eccentric, working off his own time. She says he didn’t like being tied down by anything. Not work, not her, not even time itself. He was a fickle man. In my daydreams, he’s always running away from everything, his back always turned away and shaded. I’m scared it’s not just me, but Mum too that forgets.
Recently, I have been satisfying myself with telling the time. Funny, yes, I know. I check it constantly without a watch, just like he used to. He had this odd way of knowing exactly the time of day by the placements of the sun and the shadows, the movement of the birds and whatnot. For the longest time as a child, my Mum taught me his way of telling the time. I can tell the time through the trees. For example, I know that when the sun fades behind the oak tree in the garden, light splicing and fracturing into tiny dots, and a hand shoots up to shield the retinas, you know that it is a quarter past five. When the bark blurs into descending darkness and an owl hoots from its upper branches, it is later than seven. Whenever I visit home, Mum and I watch from the kitchen window for the first signs of those familiar wings vibrating in open air. Every time I feel a little closer to him. A tiny slice of his brain in imbedded inside my own, and my eyes, ears, nose, mouth, they all become his. It’s as if a tiny bridge opens back to him, wherever he is.
It’s odd then that I feel that disconnect, you might think. But the materiality of everything, no matter what you might protest, does matter. There are memories you will make at eighteen that you’ll think are life-changingly important. By twenty-one you won’t even remember that you’ve forgotten it. I always keep a watch with me now. He would’ve never have worn one and would hate that I insist on wearing one. If he were here, maybe he would ask me to take it off or break it or something. It’s ironic then that it’s my only way back to him now. But it’s a bridge I must cross if I’m to keep any part of him at all, no matter how fragile.