One-Hundred Days

You taste like cigarettes and coffee, two harsh tastes mixing together with harsher features, like eyes that can burn through me with a single glance. Eyes that can liven my slow heart each time they meet mine.
You have a harsh voice slipping off your lashing tongue, but your words are so delicate, crushed by the smallest bit of wind that flows through our clothes and the grass winding around our legs.

You are harsh, in personality and features, but I have no time to soften your jaw and smooth your lips. I have no time to fall in love with you.

I stare, oh believe me, I stare and I wonder. I wonder what I would be if I could be with you for more than just those few moments, absorbed by my tired eyes and dry lips like holy water by a sinner. I stare and think how I could become better, how I could learn to love myself more by watching you, your confidence literally seeping from every part of you.

I stare and I wonder what we could be if I had time.

As you pull me close in our daily gesture of tensioned friendship, I let myself stay in your arms just a little longer. I let myself absorb the confidence running through the marrow of your bones. I let it seep into my own, in hopes that I will take your own confidence to speak words that are dying to fall from my lips to your feet.

Yet, while I am standing against, a ball of jumbled nerves, shooting from right to left, here to there, you are nothing but calm. The heartbeat I can hear beating through your chest is slow and cool, and the sound of it calms my own, stuttering and gasping for air. I move my face just that much closer to the center of your chest and stay for just a second longer to take this all in.

I take this all in to let the words fall from my dry and cracked lips.

I have no time, only seconds. In our world, yours and mine, seconds mean nothing. A second is taken for granted as a unit of time that matters nothing. But seconds build up time, make up every ounce of it.
When we have no seconds, we have no time.

We have no time for loving or breathing or laughing.
We have no time for crying or dancing or thinking of all the things we have won and lost through the time made up of years, laid out beside each other on an invisible map.
Without seconds, we have on time to live.

So I stay closer, taking in your harsh features and calm heart. I take in the confidence flowing around my bones from yours, and wait.
I wait for the seconds to end our time together.

We have no time for psychological romance, only time for the idea of it.
We have no time.