It takes seven innings to realize this isn’t the place you should be. It takes your friends a half-inning to fail to convince you to stay. It takes five minutes to leave the parking lot with fifty-thousand screaming fans inside, waiting for a pennant. It takes twenty minutes to drive to her suburban home just past the restaurent where you first met. It takes 10 minutes to work up the courage to get out of the car and walk to the door below a painted sky. It takes 10 seconds to peel your eyes off the linoleum floor and look her in the eyes. It takes 2 seconds to say the words “I love you.”
It takes thirty-two years to be the person you’ve always wanted to be.
It takes three drinks before you walk over to her table and introduce yourself to her friend because you are too nervous to look at her, too worried of what her eyes might tell you before it’s even got started. It takes four nervous rings before she answers the phone and then it only takes a millisecond for her voice to come through. It takes five more minutes for you to ask her out again, and it takes her five seconds to respond which feels more like an hour. It takes four or five dates before you first see her bare chest and it takes an unmeasurably small amount of time to see how beautful she is. It takes seven months before you have your first fight, which lasts eight minutes and then it takes ten hours before you leave the bed as blasts of sun come through the windows. It takes a little too long to propose.
Her mother calls you and tells you about the accident, and time breaks loose in a million different directions and nowhere at the same time. It takes ten minutes to get the hospital when it should take thirty. It only takes 0.03 seconds for a person to lose consciousness after a collision of that force, someone tells you, as if it would somehow make it better. You have no idea how long it takes you to finally fall asleep in the only chair next to her bed, holding a hand that doesn’t hold back. No one knows how long it takes for someone to come out of a coma, or if they ever will. It takes a finite amount of time to die and an infinite amount of time to be dead. It takes twenty-five second for nurses to flood the room when summoned by a dead flat electronic G. It takes eighty-nine words to sum up her life in the back of a newspaper, eighty-nine words that takes fourty-two seconds to read. You could have written ten-thousand. It takes three people saying ‘everything will be alright’ to conclude that it never will be. It takes thirty minutes to approach the open casket and three people to tear you away.
It takes ten more years to realize that while everything else takes, love is the only thing that can give.
