The Clock Ticks Like A Metal Heart

Nokkhotro,

The clock ticks like a metal heart. I am old enough now to watch the gears catch and chew. One by one, my friends step into the white machinery of it all. The wedding cakes, the swollen bellies, the neat, ticking rhythm of the good life. I am supposed to be a wax figure in that parlor by now, poured into a proper mold. But my wiring is faulty. You know this. A spark gap where the domestic circuit should close.

They say life unwinds like a spool of white thread, demanding patience. I refuse the needle. I will not recite the script just because everyone else has memorized it, wearing their painted smiles. What is the point of rotting slowly beside a stranger in a perfectly furnished room? I cannot divide my heart into sensible, bloody little cubes and serve it on a platter for stability. It is the whole pulsing organ, or nothing. Total electrocution, or the dark.

And then you. You broke the timeline. By all clinical logic, I should be locked into a contract by now, not feeling the oxygen rush into my lungs again. If the calendar were merciful, you would have come sooner. We would not be standing on opposite sides of this glass wall. The distance is not just physical. It is reality, cold and architectural. The world enforces its quiet, crushing rules.

There is a strange honesty I owe you. I see the measuring tape the world uses, and I see how I am measured against you. I find myself in an absurd position. I love you with a terrifying gravity, yet I am building a sterilized room in my mind to love you from afar. A paradox, yes. Tuesday I plan the architecture of our shared life. Thursday I practice the cold asceticism of a monk. Both are absolute.

The truth is a white bone. I will not find another you. I am not a hysterical boy. I am a man who has bled, who has tallied the losses, who knows the clinical difference between a collision and a fusion. I have sat at dinner tables with people and thought, yes, we could survive each other. But I never called them the missing half. The word tasted like ash. Until you.

There were no brass bands. It was the quiet of a scalpel. It is how you look at the bruised world. The way you wear your grief like a heavy, soft shawl. You swallow the world's injustices like black medicine. Your silences, your sudden yellow laughter. You are an open nerve, completely unarmored, impossible to break. I did not need to press my fingers to your pulse to know. The compass needle swung violently, then stopped. It pointed directly at you.

Certainty is a trap. It means I cannot substitute you with a mannequin, someone merely adequate. It would be a cruel surgical graft. The body would reject it. My architecture is now brutally simple. Either I construct a life with you, a long, quiet breathing in the same room. Or I close the door. I seal myself in my completeness, carrying you like a phantom limb. A permanent ghost, immune to geography.

Do not pity me. I am not a weeping shadow in the corner. I have a spine. I have ambitions sharp as glass. I have learned to plaster over my own fractures, to stand perfectly straight in the empty room and call it peace. Loving you does not obliterate my borders. It simply splits the sky open.

If you leave me standing here, do not drag the heavy sack of guilt. I will mourn, certainly. The black dog will come. But I will not chain you to my grief. Pure love is not a debt collector. It does not hold a knife to the throat. I will love you from the sterile distance. Unblinking. My love is not a parasite. It feeds on the fact of your existence, not your presence.

It was never about the flesh. Not the things the catalog lists. I fell in love with the unvarnished marrow of you. I did not need to wrap my skin around yours to feel the current. Your voice, your smile, the microscopic, vulnerable pieces of you that the blind world walks right over. It is a house with a lit window in a black forest. I need nothing else. Only you. And if the verdict is distance, I will make a terrarium of the silence. I will sit inside it, perfectly still, watching the white moon peel back the shadows.

Warmly,
Kokkhopoth Bashi