Volume I: The Interior Life; The WAtch

The Watch.

Every other piece of jewelry is decoration. The watch works.

The necklace is beautiful. The earrings are beautiful. The ring means something. But they just sit there. The watch gets looked at a hundred times a day—more than her phone, more than her mirror, more than anything else she wears. She checks it when she's calculating if she can make it across town. When she's deciding whether to stay for another drink. When she's ready to leave and needs a reason.

The watch is where she goes to negotiate with time.

I notice when a woman checks her watch instead of her phone.

It's a different gesture entirely. The phone means digging through a bag, a screen lighting up with notifications, the pull of the scroll. The phone always wants something back. The watch just answers the question. What time is it. That's all. She glances, she knows, she decides. No rabbit hole. No distraction. Just the information she asked for.

There's something about that. The woman who wears a watch has decided her attention isn't up for grabs. She's not going to get trapped in the meeting that's running long or the conversation that stopped being interesting fifteen minutes ago. She knows what time it is. She'll leave when she's ready.

A watch is almost always given.

The graduation. The first real job. The promotion. The inheritance. Somewhere along the way, someone decided she'd become the kind of woman who wears a real watch—not a fitness tracker, not something trendy—a watch.

That stays with you. Not just the metal on your wrist. The moment it arrived. The person who handed it to you. Who you were becoming.

I still wear one that was given to me as a gift. The face is smaller than anything you'd buy now. The band still near new as it’s only worn it beautiful moments of celebration. It loses two minutes every month and I've never fixed it.

I like those two minutes. They're hers.

Most women own more watches than they wear.

The drawer fills up. The one from that phase in 2019. The fitness tracker that made every outfit look like you were headed to the gym. The gift from someone who almost understood your taste but not quite. Dead batteries. Stiff bands. Waiting for a life that's not coming.

But somewhere in that drawer—or already on her wrist—is the one.

Big face or small. Leather or metal. Inherited or chosen. Doesn't matter. What matters is she reaches for it without thinking, same as the coat. It goes on and the day starts. It comes off and the day is done. Everything between, it's there. Quiet. Keeping time.

Here's what I think wearing a watch really means: you've accepted that time is actually passing.

That sounds obvious. It's not. There are entire industries built on the opposite premise—the cream, the procedure, the filter, the lie. All saying: time isn't real, you can stop it, you don't have to let it touch you.

The watch says something else.

The watch says: I know what time it is. I know it's moving. I'm not pretending.

And the woman who isn't pretending? She doesn't waste it. Doesn't give hours to people who don't deserve them. Doesn't let Tuesday disappear into nothing. She knows what she has and she spends it like it matters.

Because it does.

The coat is the first thing strangers see.

The scent is the last thing intimates remember.

The watch is the object she looks at most—this quiet, constant negotiation between where she is and where she needs to be. Between how long something has taken and how much longer she'll give it.

Every glance at her wrist is a tiny decision. Stay or go. Wait or leave. Give this more time, or take her time back.

The watch doesn't tell her what to do. It just tells her what she has left. She decides how to spend it.