Counting the Beats
by Jalina Mhyana
I slide a pinky beneath the leather band of my love’s watch and feel his humid skin. I love this virgin bracelet around his wrist, the manacle of tan line where he unbuckles the hours and becomes master of our time together.
We divide one moment from another with embraces, laughter, kisses, breath. My body is a timepiece wrapped around him, the moments gaining speed with our rocking.
Scientists have demonstrated that two living heart cells placed in a petri dish together will gravitate toward one another and their beats will synchronize. I haven’t worn a watch since I was eighteen, wary of anything that outpaced my pulse. A ticking watch might confuse my blood: which is the true heart?
My life has gentler cycles, beginning with the journey of the sun. Sundials are more human-paced; they cast lazy shadows and measure days by half hours, give or take. Before village bell towers, the sundial was king. Shadows slid off the sides of buildings—evening’s laconic striptease.
We once lived in a 400-year old cottage in Buckinghamshire near a parish church that tolled the hour at precisely twenty-three minutes past the hour, every hour. You could set your watch by it. I smiled when I noticed; a village clock set to my own obliviousness.
I tell time by statues, too—each stone shadow morphs and lengthens. Every evening as the sun sets, a muse of lyric poetry leans slowly, darkly, from her rooftop plinth on the Oxford skyline and bends across an alley, slinking onto a medieval wall. By nightfall half of her body has climbed into a window of a student dormitory. When the window is lit, her shadow disappears like a cat thief and all that’s left is her heavy half standing sentinel over the Bodleian. It takes just a second to arrest her movement after hours of progress toward that room.
Last year in a watchmaker’s store window display on via Romana, near Boboli Garden, I saw a still life of a disassembled pocket watch that appeared to float—invisible threads holding each minuscule component mid-air; wheels, cogs, spokes, screws and coils suspended in space as if the watch had been photographed in the act of explosion.
The anatomy of a second.
I can’t think of anything I’d like to do inside of a second. A kiss, even a blink, would fall outside the lines of that seismic tick.
In August I didn’t have to miss the reassuring punctuations of family life: doors opening and closing, laughter in an adjoining room, smells from the kitchen, wet footprints on the bathroom floor. My girls were with me.
In the time it takes to conceptualize a second, or pronounce its syllables, it’s gone. Loss comes soon enough. How thin can you slice a minute? What is its smallest atom?
I’d rather wear an hourglass around my neck than a watch on my wrist. My body is an hourglass, anyway, in shape and function. It tells me what time it is; its hungers and exhaustions toll bells in my mind. I wind my body by curling in a circle and letting my mind replay the day over and over, till I fall asleep.
I write this in January but illustrated nasturtiums still bloom above August on my wall calendar. I’m months behind the days. I sleep with a hot water bottle but refuse to acknowledge winter.
My calendar is just as nostalgic as I am.
If it’s still August, that means my daughters are still here in Florence celebrating my birthday with me and not back starting new lives in the states. They’ll be by my side here, no big deal, acting as though it’s normal to have a mother in exile. We’ll play out our old family routines as best as possible, turning blind eyes.
In August I didn’t have to miss the reassuring punctuations of family life: doors opening and closing, laughter in an adjoining room, smells from the kitchen, wet footprints on the bathroom floor. My girls were with me.
From September to January I curled up in the memory of August and refused to enter autumn; refused to be alone again, in a foreign country, an immigrant jumping at the doorbell and the immigration police that might be waiting on the other side.
In my thoughts I followed my daughters’ wet footsteps across the bathroom floor again and again, in a house many countries away, a world away, a world that I’m deported from, not allowed to enter.
Funny the things we remember. I used to worry about slipping on their slick footprints and cracking my head on the floor. Ever since August I’ve prayed their slippery pathway wouldn’t evaporate, like I’m chasing them, and if I hop from step to step I’ll eventually catch up. I’ve teetered along the elegant arcs of their insteps, carefully, fitting my whole self in each wedge as if I might fall off the cliff of their memory and drown in bathroom tiles.
Another family inhabits that house now. I lurk at the windows, looking for hints of my family.
The Gregorian calendar ought to be a procession of Augusts. I’m not interested in the following months, of a future alone after twenty years with my family, of autumn and its evergreens. Even the word “ever” is a lie, as if green is invincible. Everything browns, rusts, sags, turns. Turns away.
But time moves slower than we imagine.
My timepieces are organic: the sun traveling from my ankle to my knee as I write this, my daughters turning away from my affections, the somnolent nod of tulips on my dining table during my divorce, and the limp in my dog’s leg that led him to the grave – these are the things I orbit, the timepieces I wind over and over in my thoughts.
Jalina Mhyana is the author of three poetry collections, one of which won publication in the Pudding House competition, as well as Dreaming in Night Vision, an illustrated hybrid book of prose. Her work appears in or is forthcoming from The Southeast Review, The Cincinnati Review, CutBank, The Roanoke Review, and others. “Counting the Beats” is an excerpt from her memoir about immigration and displacement, for which she is seeking representation. Learn more at