11:11

I used to think 11:11 was a lucky time.

You make a wish. You close your eyes. You wait for the universe to do something with it.

He knew I believed in that.

So he gave me an alarm clock that stopped at 11:11 and asked me, every night, “What did you wish for?”

I never told him.

Because the truth was, I had already got my wish.

It was him.

He had arrived at a time when I was learning how to live with the pieces of myself I had not yet put back together. He did not try to fix me. He simply stayed. He made me laugh when I had forgotten how. Once, he even brought me multivitamins and announced that if I let him tell me he loved me, my hair would grow, my nails would get stronger and my confidence would skyrocket.

I laughed so hard that day.

I did not know some people become memories while they are still standing in front of you.

We loved each other.

That was never the problem.

The problem was that love had arrived without a future.

We knew it. We just kept pretending we did not.

On New Year's Day, I went to see him.

I had made him a handmade card because I have always been foolish enough to believe that things made by hand carry pieces of the person who made them.

Inside, I wrote:

“My absence is your New Year's present.”

He read it twice.

Neither of us said anything.

The clock was in my hand.

11:10.

We sat there, close enough to hold each other, far enough to know we shouldn't.

There are goodbyes that sound like goodbye.

Ours didn't.

Ours sounded like two people discussing everything except the fact that they were about to lose each other.

Then the alarm rang.

11:11.

My hand slipped.

The clock fell between us.

For a second, neither of us moved.

I looked at the broken clock and whispered, “Nothing's forever.”

He picked it up.

Looked at me.

Then smiled.

“You're right,” he said.

“Nothing's forever.”

His fingers found mine one last time.

“And you're my nothing.”

I don't remember leaving.

I don't remember the road home.

I only remember placing that broken clock beside my bed that night.

Months passed.

I stopped waiting for him.

Stopped checking my phone.

Stopped asking the universe to bring him back.

But every night, when the room went quiet, my eyes still found the clock.

11:11.

The hands never moved again.

Neither did I, for a moment.

Because perhaps some wishes don't come true.

Perhaps some wishes become people.

And perhaps the cruelest thing about losing someone is not that they leave.

It is that a part of you keeps arriving at the same time every night,

still waiting for them to come home.