Reflections On Time
It’s strange, how it goes. The hours stretch on endlessly, yet the years vanish in an instant.
We spend our lives waiting—waiting for moments, for milestones, for the things we ache to reach. We count down, mark the days, hold our breath in anticipation. And then we blink. And somehow, it was ten years ago. Somehow, we’ve lost entire decades to memory, entire lifetimes to time slipping through our fingers like sand.
Where does it all go?
We measure our existence in inches, in accomplishments, in the lines that etch themselves into our skin. We watch our faces soften and sag, our bodies change, our youth retreat from the mirror like a tide that never comes back in. The skin that once held us together begins to pull away from the bones—the bones, the only part of us that lingers when everything else is gone. When our time runs out, they will remain. Silent. Wordless. A relic of a life no one will fully remember, an artifact with no stories left to tell except the simple truth that we were here.
Time is relentless. It ticks and measures, clicks and carves, pushing us forward even when we beg it to stop. It moves us through the hurt, drags us away from the sorrow, forces us to heal even when we don’t want to. It stretches the space between memories, between loves, between beginnings and endings. Until one day, there are no more beginnings left.
And then time buries us.
It tucks us into its depths, folds us into history, until we are little more than whispers, little more than a past no one call recall.
And I wonder—what was it all for? The beginnings, the middles, the endings. The endless cycle of gain and loss, of loving and grieving, of creating and watching it all slip away. We build and we build, only to leave it all behind. We lose people. We lose pieces of ourselves. And then, in the end, we lose ourselves entirely.
And maybe that’s the saddest part of all.
In the quietest moments, when vulnerability presses against my ribs, I think about all the time that has already slipped away. Every passing minute is another loss, another breath exhaled into the void, never to return. A tiny death.
A life is nothing more than 42 million tiny deaths—each minute vanishing into the ether, irretrievable, unrepeatable. They slip through our fingers as we move forward, as we chase, as we grieve, as we love, as we lose. And yet, we never feel the weight of them until we stop—until we realize how much of ourselves we’ve already left behind.
As time ticks us out of existence, we shed ourselves in layers, leaving behind ghosts—faint, translucent echoes of the people we once were. Shadows imprinted on the spaces we’ve touched, whispers of lives we can never return to. Every day, I bury another version of myself in the cemetery of me.
I am the child who believed in Santa Claus for far too long, wide-eyed and unafraid, certain the world was full of magic. I am the teenager drowning in dreams too big for my small hands, carrying a sorrow so petulant, so dramatic, I thought it might crush me. I am the twenty-something who lived like time was infinite, who wasted whole seasons thinking there would always be more. I am the thirty-year-old pushing boulders up endless hills, desperate to carve meaning into the years slipping through my fingers.
All of these selves still live beneath my skin, buried in the spaces between my ribs. I carry them with me, their voices whispering through my bones, their laughter echoing in empty corridors of memory. But they are gone. Each one lost to the quiet, merciless ticking of time.
And today—today, I am a memorial to them.
