If Only

Excellence Award in the 'Step Write Up 2011' competition

“If only I had more time”
He says, as school begins and days blend and blur, melt together and rain down on him.
As his friends drift away and words, disconnected sentences of his textbooks pull together, cloud his mind.

“If only I had more time”
He says, as he pulls all nighters at the local petrol pump, money for Uni.
Summer burns memories into his family’s skin, holidays spent without him, snapped Polaroids marking his missing place, his parents slipping like sand through his fingers.

“If only I had more time”
He says, as lovers come and go, sweet raptures of skin, tongue and teeth. Pull his pieces apart, arching into ghost touches, return to the ground in tremors, left in fragments on the floor.

“If only I had more time”
He says, as friends get married and leave him, crisp suits and silk dresses, holidays in Vienna, summer houses by the coast, while he sits in office rooms listening to the symphony of air conditioners.

“If only I had more time”
He says, as his wife sits at home alone, tracing his fleeting heat on the bed sheets. Wraps her fingers around memories, cuts them to fit inside her luggage and slings them over her shoulder, leaves her heart in a box by the door, “Keep it, I need it no longer”.

“If only I had more time”
He says, as his children grow up and leave him, soccer practices and band recitals with empty reserved seats. Young love, heartbreak and graduation, among the many moments he’ll miss, while he sits in a cramped cubicle number crunching wishing his children still needed him.

“If only I had more time”
He says as his hair whitens and lines etch into his face, map out bitter regret into his skin. As his bones bend and break, creak and moan under his weight. As his lungs give way with a gasp and slowly, delicately deflate, as his heart slows and trembles, pulsates and falters…stops, and with a final breath he whispers, “If only I had more time”.

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