The Watch I Stopped Wearing When I Stopped Waiting

For years, I wore a small silver watch with a face the colour of rain. It was inexpensive, slightly scratched and permanently five minutes fast, but I treated it like evidence. Whenever I glanced at it, I was measuring the distance between now and the moment someone might arrive.

The watch came to represent a particular kind of hope: quiet, disciplined and exhausting. I carried it through train stations, cafés and unfamiliar bedrooms, letting its ticking explain why I had stayed. Then one afternoon, I took it off and placed it in a drawer. Nothing dramatic happened. I simply realised I was no longer waiting for a person to become ready.

The Timepiece That Kept Score

I bought the watch at a weekend market in Melbourne, from a stall crowded with old cameras, brass keys and jewellery arranged on faded velvet. The seller said it had belonged to a woman who wore it every day. I liked that detail, though I knew it might have been invented to make the sale feel intimate.

At the time, I was seeing someone who lived by delays. Messages arrived hours late. Plans remained vague until the last minute. Affection appeared in sudden, generous bursts and then disappeared behind silence. The watch gave these gaps a shape. Six o’clock meant I could still hear from them. Seven meant I should wait a little longer. Eight meant I had to decide whether leaving counted as giving up.

I began checking the watch before checking my phone. It became a private ritual, a small silver permission slip to remain hopeful.

Waiting Became A Daily Habit

Waiting changed my relationship with ordinary places. At a Sydney train platform, I watched the minutes move while commuters stepped around me. In cafés, I chose seats facing the entrance, even when the sunlight made it difficult to read. I learnt the familiar Australian habit of ordering a flat white and pretending to be occupied while looking towards the door.

My phone was always face-up. The watch was always visible. Together, they created a life organised around interruption: the expected call, the last-minute apology, the message that began with “Sorry, I’ve been busy.” I told myself that patience was a form of devotion. Eventually, I recognised it as a way of postponing my own decisions.

That period appears in fragments whenever I write about love and absence. I once returned to that long night because I could still remember the exact hour when hope became embarrassing. Writing it down did not make the memory kinder, but it made the pattern easier to see.

The Cost Of Keeping Time

There was a financial cost to waiting, too. I bought coffees I did not want, taxis home after plans collapsed and new clothes for occasions that never happened. At a vintage market, I kept looking at watches as if a different strap or larger face might offer better luck. The local market was full of beautiful objects with previous lives, and I was drawn to anything that looked as though it had survived disappointment.

In Australia, the Australian Consumer Law gives people rights when goods are faulty or do not match their description. I sometimes think about that protection when I remember the watch. It worked exactly as promised. It kept time, even when the relationship did not. No law could protect me from a bargain I had made with myself: I would accept uncertainty in exchange for the possibility of being chosen.

The watch was not defective. My expectations were.

The Moment I Took It Off

The decision happened on an ordinary weekday. I had been waiting for a message since breakfast, though I had already received enough information from the silence. Outside, the afternoon light had that sharp brightness familiar in Australian summer, the kind that makes every shop window look exposed.

I unclasped the watch before leaving home. Its metal band had left a faint mark around my wrist. For a moment, I felt strangely unprepared, as if I had removed a uniform. Then I put it in the drawer with old receipts, spare buttons and a key whose lock I could no longer identify.

I did not replace it with another watch. I started carrying my phone only when I needed it. I stopped checking the time before deciding whether I was enjoying myself. These were small acts, but they returned something to me: the right to experience an hour without assigning it to somebody else.

Learning To Arrive For Myself

Without the watch, I began making plans that did not depend on another person’s availability. I went to galleries alone, took long walks after work and learnt which Melbourne trams connected to quiet streets rather than crowded shopping strips. I discovered that an evening could be full without being witnessed.

The change was clearest in the way I left places. I no longer stayed until the staff began stacking chairs. I did not invent explanations for someone who had failed to appear. If a plan became uncertain, I made another one. Waiting stopped being the main event and became what it had always been: a gap between things.

I still missed the person. Freedom did not erase tenderness, and clarity did not turn the past into a mistake. I simply stopped using longing as proof that I should remain available.

What The Drawer Holds Now

The watch still exists. Every so often, I open the drawer and see its silver face beneath a bundle of tangled necklaces. It has become an artefact rather than an instruction. Its hands continue moving, but they no longer tell me when to forgive, when to reach out or how long love should be given to prove itself.

I wrote about another version of that reckoning in a night of reckoning, because certain memories refuse to stay in one form. They become essays, scenes, conversations and sometimes fiction. That transformation is one of the few ways I know to honour what happened without letting it govern what happens next.

Now I wear a watch only when I want to. Sometimes that means checking the time before a meeting or catching a train. Sometimes it means leaving my wrist bare. The difference is choice. Time belongs to me again, and I no longer confuse its passing with a promise that someone will return.

If this story touches a memory of your own, write it down in the form that suits you: an essay, a letter, a scene or a piece of fiction. Read more personal reflections on Never Date a Writer, and send your story for consideration if you have an experience that deserves to be transformed into language.