Back then, we would count our days together: Seven, Thirty, Three-Hundred and Sixty-Five. And Before we could stop to think, we had become the safe parts of each others' minds that slow down our growing up. You and I. we were Us.

But then you grew out of me, and into the city. And I could feel it in the shortness of your breaths and the quickness of your eyes. How your veins were flooded with carbon, and your skin shrouded with whatever heat it could gather. You were becoming more of a line than a point, a blurred stream of your routines spread thin across the minutes. You were racing to become all of yourself in an impossible time.

I remember missing you in those pendulum swings. You were unfathomably quick, I'll commend you for that. Quicker than life. Quicker than me.  But then one day, you stopped ticking and my world stopped moving. And then the doctors started counting down: One-Sixty, One-Twenty, Eighty, Fifty, Thirty, Twenty, Ten. And so I simply stopped feeling. And that's how these things came to pass.