Tick.

Yellow Sweater

Tick.

The ticking is all I can hear these days.  Every second is another tick until the ticking fills my head and strangles me.  You would think I would be used to it after so many years.  Sixteen years and two clocks steadily ticking away.  Sixteen and two makes eighteen.  But eighteen isn’t important at all.  Things that aren’t important waste my time.  My time is ticking away.  I’m going to die.  I know I’m going to die.

Tick.

I don’t know which is which.  I never know which is which.  I don’t know which one comes first.  I have two wrists and two clocks, but I can never tell which is which.  I can’t tell the ticking apart.  It sounds all the same.  It sounds relentless.  They tell me how much time is left.  How much time is left before I die?  The second one is supposed to help me.  It’s supposed to help me find my true love.  I don’t believe in love.  I don’t believe in anything.

Tick.

One clock says 336 hours.  The other says 335 hours.  These are the numbers that define me.  It doesn’t really matter which one is which, does it?  Either way I die.  Either way I die in two weeks.  I die in fourteen days.  What’s one more hour of life worth?  I might die before I meet my love.  I might die one hour after I meet my love.  I don’t know.  I never know which is which.  The doctors can’t tell me.  I don’t try to understand anymore.  Even if I scrub my wrists red and raw with soap the ink can never come off.

Tick.

I board the bus and sit in the exact middle on the right hand side.  I always sit there.  My headphones are already upon my head.  Music helps.  Sort of.  I listen to whatever I can find.

I don’t look out the window at the swirling leaves and the busy streets.  I stare at my wrists.  My aunt sat me down last night after she came home from work.  She told me the ticking is all in my head.  Everyone else in the world has the clocks and they don’t hear a thing.  I just nodded, but questions were burning in my mind.  Why can I never drown the ticking out if it’s all in my head?  Why has it been getting louder and louder each year?

I stare at my wrists.  Then I pull my sleeves down.

The bus lurches to a stop and I stare at the floor, pretending that all I hear is the music.  The girl gets on the bus and sits next to me.  The girl has been sitting next to me for two months, since the beginning of the school year.  I’m not her friend but she always gives me a smile, greets me, and sits beside me.  I don’t talk.  She sometimes makes cheery remarks.  One time she asked for my name.  I told her, “Alithea.”

She calls me “Thea” now.

The girl always wears a bright yellow sweater with the name “Evelyn” stitched into it in cursive.  Peach colored glasses sit upon her nose.  Her hair is short and poofy and usually tucked into a beanie.  Today she’s wearing the sweater and overalls.  She smiles like always and sits down next to me, pulling a book out of her bag.  As she reads, I stare at her wrists.  The bright outline of the clocks contrasts against her dark skin.  On her right wrist, the bold label reads “Love”.  Beneath the label is a clock that has stopped ticking.  Her wrist is missing the number that is supposed to be underneath the clock.

On her other wrist the “Death” clock is ticking away silently.  Her number is 621,854.  She has time.

White hot, nauseating jealousy rushes through me.  I am jealous of the girl’s silence.  Jealous of her time and her labels.  She knows which is which.  She will live a long happy life.  She will not be plagued by the ticking.  I clench my fists as the ticking once again overwhelms my senses, reminding me of the time that is slipping away from me day by day.