After the talk, after they had separated and she had left him out in front of the bar and she had walked away, heading to her car, all of the words said, he stood silent, stunned, shocked. That? That was how it was ending? After years together? That was what really happened, when he didn’t know, when he had no idea, when he suspected nothing- that was how it was ending? In shock, his mind spun, flooded by word fragments and memories and her careful explanation and what he had just seen- the change in her countenance toward him, the distance in her eyes, her trying to act like he was a stranger, a customer at her teller window at the bank, to whom she was giving $200 dollars in $20’s. Like she had never knew him like she did. All the words were said, and she walked away like she had just hung her “Next Teller Please” sign, her work there done.

Dazed, he climbed the stairs in the parking garage until he reached the 3rd floor, and he walked 40 yards in the dull light to the back of his car which was parked by a wall. Once before it, he turned away from it and leaned against it and raised both of his hands over his head and stared into the dull yellow light of a streetlamp outside of the structure, breathing slowly. He stared and thought, and stared, and then he looked at the face of his watch.

It was an odd feeling. It was what you would feel like if your village, a coastal beacon, high and secure above the sea wall, suddenly tremored and then chunked off of the mainland, a flake sheered off and thrown like a dish onto the fleeing sea. He thought “This is what it’s like to be that polar bear, stuck on the shard of ice, that has drifted too far from the berg, that is drifting out into the sea. Nowhere else to go. No space to walk on, except in a small circuit around the tiny surface, looking back, seeing everything solid, everything it’s known, everything familiar, drifting away behind it.” This is what it is like when the door closes. What its like when lovers drift apart in the black night in the cold waves after the Titanic has rolled and pitched into the deep, and there is nothing to hold onto any more for long.

He stared at the watch face before him, at the seconds hand that rhythmically plodded up one side of the dial and then down the other side. He watched the hand evenly circle the face for several rounds. He saw it pacing out the passing moments of his life, and a feeling of panic welled up under his breastbone and rose through the back of his neck, bursting like bloom of loud anger in his head. He spontaneously, without cognizance, unbuckled the watch so that he could open the leather straps and pull the timepiece off, and then closing his eyes, he turned and threw it as hard as he could against the parking garage wall beyond his car. His vision was glazed with a bright red, like his eyes suddenly became heated metal orbs in a fire, and he exploded in a screeching stream of formerly stuffed and thoroughly shut away phrases of pain and poison directed at the watch. If he had not been alone, he would have looked crazy, disturbed, to any passersby. And with a start, he then ran after the watch, so after it had smashed into the concrete wall and fell to the ground, he jumped on it heavily, with all of the weight and force he could find, to crush the circling hands into the concrete and make them quit moving.

When he lifted his foot and pieces of ground crystal fell from his shoe to the ground, the face of the watch was folded like a contact lens, and the torqued hands no longer moved. And then he was aware his head felt twice its normal size, and that his hair was drenched in sweat, and that he was breathing hard, breathing heavily. His temples pounded, and the red glow in his eyes remained, and he stood bent over the watch by the wall, opening and closing his eyes, trying to slow his huffing, thinking about being on the ice and what he had known drifting away behind him, and the fact he still couldn’t stop time even if the watch was destroyed, and collapsed into the wall, folded down on his supporting knees, and the fire in his head became a hot spring that sent warm tears streaking down his face as his huffing changed into long low moans and he cried.