officer's small

It took man five days to go from Houston to the moon in 1969. It took Swiss Army 34 days to replace the battery in my watch in 2007.

On June 22, I visited the Swiss Army store in SoHo because my watch had stopped. With a straight face, the clerk told me it would take a minimum of four weeks to replace the battery. I didn't ask questions and submitted to the insanity. I left the store with a lightness in my wrist I hadn't felt for 11 years.

For the first two weeks I felt strange and incomplete. I kept glancing at my left wrist only to find a pale oval where my watch once rested. I didn't feel loss. Not the panic of sudden and permanent separation. What I felt was closer to longing, as if my lover had been sent on assignment overseas. By the third week, I learned to tell time by lifting my head and searching for wall clocks, asking other people, and looking at my cell phone. I had grown used to the absence of my watch, but I didn't forget it. Longing turned into missing, as if I was a mother and my children had stopped writing to me from summer camp.

When I finally retrieved my watch, I was surprised by how big its face was. Of course it hadn't grown. That would have been impossible. But the band did hang looser. (Had I lost weight? How had they managed to stretch the metal?) I thought I saw more scratches. (Was it this battered last month? How could I not have noticed?) It felt heavier. It felt like falling in love with an old love all over again.