It's interesting how the passing of time overwhelms me now. As a child I'd desperately await an hours end so I could have lunch or get on the school bus to go home. These days I have a sinking feeling when I look at the clock and realize it's 3:00pm and I haven't done anything. Some days I want to take the clock right off the wall, but it's probably ill advised. And then I think maybe it's not time at all that breaks my heart. Maybe it's a worry that next year will be the same as this one and that this one wasn't good enough based on unattainable standards the world has set for me. Or that time is moving too quickly for me to do the things I intended to do and that when I've wasted an hour, I've lost it. And maybe those hours will start accumulating and before I know it, I'll be at the end of my life, smaller, frailer, older, and unaware that my time is up. That I won't ever get to do the things I wanted or live how I wanted as the person I really am. It's one of those things that presents itself through wet eyelashes, a runny nose and an indescribable feeling in my gut.
I do recognize that it is a little odd that I begin each new year of my life feeling such sadness. It's privileged of me really. I can't definitively tell you why I feel that way, there's no real issue or reason to feel it or to express here in words that I am feeling it. But I have... for myself I suppose. Maybe one day years from now I'll read this and throw my head back and laugh at my melodrama or my lack of understanding what real sadness is, or how deeply one can truly feel. Maybe instead of the small laugh lines I'm slowly creating now, my face and body will be full of so many more lines that hold stories embedded in different feelings.
Awhile back, I shared an essay by Joan Didion with a friend. It's called 'On Keeping a Notebook' and I decided to re-read it today because there's a line in there I think about all the time. "Keepers of private notebooks are a different breed altogether, lonely and resistant rearrangers of things, anxious malcontents, children afflicted apparently at birth with some presentiment of loss." I know it's a bit over the top, but the part about loss felt like what I'd tried to put my finger on my whole adult life but could not quite grasp. I have felt that way for as long as I can remember. But the admittance of that same thing makes me ashamed. Because there's absolutely no reason for it and that feels weak and nonsensical. But maybe that's what I feel as another year begins for me. Loss. And that feeling outweighs the prospects of what's to come because it hasn't happened yet. But I have been stripped of my twenty-fifth year and all of the things that happened and didn't happen and now they no longer exist, trapped in the thing we call a past, resurfacing only in my neo-cortex on occasion to release some endorphins or to block serotonin - like the tides bringing in clumps of ugly seaweed and the occasional treasure and then sweeping it away back into the vast deep sea.
I don't really know what I'm getting at, to be honest, it's taken me nearly three months to write this. Of course, it was originally about something else and then another thing and another (x10) until it eventually became what it is now, which admittedly, is a mess of run on sentences and grammatically incorrect prose leading you through just one trail in my brain. An unkempt one. With trees fallen across the path and overgrown bushes forcing a narrow route. And an end without a view.
I guess what I mean to say is that time scares me. It never used to. But I wish I could take the clock off my wall. Throw away my wristwatch. Never ask for the time again. I wish it didn't matter. That you simply wake up and do things how you want, and other people do the same at their pace and no one judges anyone for how long it takes to do the thing. We just do it. We just die when we die not because of old age or it's a shame because we were too young. Because if we had no regard for time, we would just be content. Never rushing to get to the next meeting on time or fashionably late to appear cool and relaxed or comparing how long it took us to achieve something. Because we did it and that's what mattered.
So even though I feel pathetic when I cannot help but to cry on New Year’s Eve or lying in bed on yet another birthday, I guess it makes some kind of weird sense. And maybe you do the same.
And maybe one day I'll be able to lay down softly on the sand and let the waves sweep me away like each year that has passed, lost at sea.
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