Five is my magic number: five fingers, five toes. Add a tongue to two eyes and two lips, and you get five. Two ears, a nose, one heart, and a brain form the final quintet. Bring in time, too, because love needs to be measured. Without time, how will I know the value of you? Time keeps track of a stab of pain, a whole lot of laughs, and a tally of the days running into each other while your car eats the miles on a road trip through hamlets with regal names like Empress and Duchess. Then summer ends and fall sneezes into scattered leaves, only to be dispersed by hives of snow. One by one, I drop pebbles in a tin and shake it until spring bounces in like a filly, her legs flailing and her neck held high to keep her balance. I count in metaphors and meteorological predictions, with odometers, the farmer's almanac, and tea leaves at the bottom of my cup. Because counting is the map of knowing when love starts and where it stops. Counting makes the unpredictable predictable. Do I not mark the days by the sound a stone makes when it hits bottom? Doesn't a stab last but a second? Do I not measure happiness in moments?

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Seconds run in circles, counted by the hands on my watch. Five seconds counted twelve times. What lives inside a minute? The shrug of a shoulder, the drop of a bomb, the cup of a chin in a five-fingered hand. Watches are eternal, like Stonehenge or a pyramid hidden in the jungle. Like words—or love—five seconds replay endlessly. Love, like life, is a loop of beginnings and endings. One. Two. Three. Four. Five. I prepare and count my fingers.

 

Too cute, you say, your preoccupation with time and the number five. OCD much? Your thinking is magical, even a little philosophical, definitely tiresome, but, and here you shrug and cup my chin before you drop your bomb, your divination is wrong. Endings are final. This ending, our ending, is final. Then you smile, say you are sorry, and kiss me until my chest hurts. The seconds whirl madly and for a brief, glorious five seconds—the duration of your kisses—I stop counting time.

 

Early, you say, and push me out the door, you want to be early for work.
But I'm not. I am five seconds too late for the five o'clock train, just as predicted.