The watch she didn't wind

The watch on the dresser belonged to a man she had loved for eleven years and one autumn. The autumn was the part she had counted, separately, the way you count the change you almost lose.

She did not wind it. The watch sat with its small dead face turned up toward the ceiling and she walked past it for months, then a year, then long enough that not winding the watch had become a thing she did rather than a thing she had failed to do.

A friend said: keep it running. A friend said: throw it out.

She kept it where it was. The watch did not measure anything. That was its job now. To be present and silent and indifferent to the hour, the way a window is indifferent to the rain, the way a chair waits without being asked.