Counting the Cost of Time: A Journey into Ownership, Value, and the Weight of Luxury #Poetry

A Watch Bought Twice

I remember the day I paid for time
like it was worth something,
traded hours I’d never get back for the chance to measure them.
They handed me a dial and a band,
slick, metallic veins wrapped tight against my wrist,
promising precision, promising forever
in a glass-domed cocoon of gears and seconds,
promising the illusion of control,
the illusion that I could hold it,
cradle each tick like a heartbeat.

It was a watch
—Swiss, stainless, seamless,
the whole of it compacted like a star collapsing inward,
black and gleaming, refusing light as if it were pure gravity.
I thought I could buy a way to keep myself anchored
to something infinite, something finely tuned and timeless,
but what I bought was a weight
—a little prison of certainty strapped to my skin.

And I wonder, what else have I bought,
what else has the wristband claimed,
each notch and hole a gateway to somewhere I am not,
somewhere I cannot be without
this heavy ring of minutes pulling me back, back, back,
as if I’d leave pieces of myself behind with every second.

I remember the first day it sat there,
shiny as a new regret,
too tight, my pulse throbbing beneath the clasp,
like a rebellion of blood against metal, against the arbitrary circle
meant to keep me in line.
But it felt too much like discipline,
felt too much like shame—
all the mirrors I’d ever stood before,
all the voices telling me I was late, I was behind,
I was losing time.

Time is money, they said.
And so I bought it.
Bought it twice.

First with currency,
cold and calculated as if buying silence,
then with my eyes, trained on every movement,
trained on that minute hand creeping
like the shadow of an advancing predator.
Each movement—so small, so patient.
I had no patience; I still don’t.

I kept looking, as if waiting for it to pause,
to betray itself and admit:
It’s all arbitrary.
I am not late, not early, not bound by these chains.

But it’s there—
the watch I wear,
the watch that wears me.
I lift my wrist and it answers,
turns its face like a lover who knows all my secrets,
knows the weight of my want to be measured,
contained, justified in increments,
even if it means I must march to the beat of a drum
made of quartz and precision.

The ticking is relentless,
a war I can’t win, a lover I can’t leave.
It knows I’m not enough, that I’m fragile,
that I buy things to build walls against the chaos,
against the sound of unmeasured hours slipping
like a thief, quiet and greedy,
taking every breath, every look, every word I leave unsaid.

The watch never asks why.
It only tells me I’m slipping—
through the gaps in its hands, through the clasp,
slipping and filling and slipping again,
like sand against glass.

And yet, here it is, worth all I am not,
worth more than I had when I bought it,
because it holds the phantom weight of all my days,
a currency I don’t own, a promise I don’t believe in,
a belief I paid for twice, not with trust but with fear,
not with hope but with want.

Oh, this watch, this metal, this cage I’ve built.
I bought it with everything I couldn’t give,
paid for it with minutes I’d never met,
bought it like a child buys a promise—
wide-eyed and wild with wonder,
thinking that something so precise could save me
from all the loose and unhinged pieces I carry.

It is a currency of flesh against metal,
of pulse against time,
of breaths stacked in little rows,
as if that could be the sum of me,
as if I am something that could be caught,
held, counted down, cashed in.

I wear it every day, every night,
its face like a mirror I can’t look away from,
a twin that knows what I refuse to see,
that time is what I can’t hold,
that all I’ve bought is an illusion of weight,
a myth of control, a cage I thought was freedom.

Every glance, every tick, is a heartbeat I lose,
a reminder that time is no currency,
that I bought nothing but shadows,
and that all I wear is my own reflection
in a polished dial,
glossed over with the promise
that one day, maybe, I’ll be on time for myself,
that one day, maybe, this watch won’t weigh
like a silent anchor.

Until then, I watch it.
I watch it watching me.
And in this silent transaction, I count the cost
of time

#TimeAndValue #Reflections #LuxuryWatch #PersonalGrowthPoem #InnerReflections #TheCostOfTime #ExpensivePossessions #Poetry #MinimalismVsMaterialism