The watch

When his grandfather died, Daniel inherited an old pocket watch. It wasn't gold. It had no precious stones. It didn't even work. On the lid there was an engraved sentence: "So that you never forget what time is really worth." For years he kept it in a drawer, convinced it was just one more keepsake. Until one afternoon, while tidying up the house, he found a box full of letters his grandfather had never sent. They were for his wife, for his children and for him. In all of them he wrote about the same thing: about the time he had lost working, about the hugs he had put off, about the family meals he had missed thinking there would be another chance. Daniel closed the last letter with a knot in his throat. He took the watch out of the drawer and looked at it in silence. It still didn't work. And for the first time, he understood that it had never been broken. The watch didn't measure the seconds that passed. It reminded him of the ones that would never come back.