TIME FLIES SO SOON

I. Birth We arrive with a cry that says everything and nothing at all. A small, wet thing pulled from the dark into a world of light that is too bright, too loud, too much. We do not know we have been born. We do not know that time has already started its countdown. We do not know that every breath is a step toward the last one. We only know warmth. We only know hunger. We only know the arms that hold us and the voice that says: You are here. You are here. And for a moment, that is enough. II. Childhood Then comes the age of wonder. The world is a playground and we are its kings. Every puddle is an ocean. Every tree is a mountain. Every day is an eternity that we waste without knowing it is a treasure. We run. We laugh. We fall. We rise. We do not know that our knees will one day ache when it rains. We do not know that the friends we swear to love forever will become names we cannot quite remember. We think we will never grow old. We think the summer will never end. We think our parents will live forever. We are wrong about everything. But we are happy. And that is enough. III. Youth Then comes the age of fire. We are fifteen. We are seventeen. We are twenty-one. We are invincible and terrified and certain and lost. We fall in love like it is a religion. We fall out of love like it is a betrayal. We write poems. We break hearts. We get our hearts broken. We swear we will never love again. We love again. We dream of the future like it is a destination we can reach if we just run fast enough. We do not know that the future is already here, that it has been here all along, that it is slipping through our fingers like water, like sand, like time. We are young. We are foolish. We are beautiful. And we do not know it. And that is the tragedy. And that is the gift. IV. Adulthood Then comes the age of weight. We wake up one morning and we are thirty. We wake up the next and we are forty. We wake up the next and we do not recognize the face in the mirror. Where did the time go? We ask. Where did the dreams go? We ask. Where did the person we swore we would become disappear to? We have jobs. We have bills. We have responsibilities that stack up like dishes in a sink we keep meaning to clean. We get married. We get divorced. We have children. We watch them grow the way our parents watched us grow— too fast, too slow, too everything. We blink. And they are gone. And we are old. And we do not know how we got here. V. Middle Age Then comes the age of reckoning. We are fifty. We are sixty. We are standing at the edge of everything we built and wondering if it was worth it. We look back at the years like photographs in an album we forgot we had. There is the child we were. There is the lover we lost. There is the dream we abandoned. There is the person we could have been if we had made different choices. We cannot go back. We know this. But we look anyway. We look until our eyes burn. We look until the past becomes a country we can never visit again. We start to lose people. A parent. A friend. A lover. A part of ourselves we did not know we were holding onto. We go to funerals. We wear black. We say words that do not capture the size of our grief. We go home. We sit in the dark. We wonder who will mourn us when our turn comes. VI. Old Age Then comes the age of quiet. We are seventy. We are eighty. We are sitting on a porch watching the sun set over a life that went by like a single breath. Our bodies betray us. Our knees ache. Our hands shake. Our memories become a house with rooms we can no longer enter. We forget names. We forget faces. We forget the sound of our own voice when we were young. But we remember. We remember everything. We remember the first kiss. We remember the first loss. We remember the day we held our child for the first time. We remember the way the light came through the window on a Tuesday afternoon when we were five years old and the world was still a mystery. We remember. And we hold those memories like coins in a closed fist, like treasures we are afraid to lose. We are not afraid of death. We are afraid of forgetting. We are afraid of being forgotten. We are afraid that all of this— the love, the loss, the joy, the pain— will vanish like it never happened. VII. Death Then comes the age of ending. We are lying in a bed that is not our own. We are surrounded by faces we almost recognize. We are holding a hand that feels like it belongs to someone else. The light is fading. The sounds are muffled. The world is growing smaller until it is just a pinprick of brightness at the end of a long, dark tunnel. We are not afraid. We are not ready. We are both at once. We think of all the things we never said. We think of all the things we never did. We think of all the people we loved and never told. We think of all the time we wasted thinking we had more. And then— And then— We let go. Not because we want to. Because we have to. Because the body knows what the mind cannot accept: that everything ends. That everything must end. That the only way to have meant something is to have been something that could be lost. VIII. After And then? We do not know. No one knows. That is the mystery. That is the terror. That is the hope. Maybe there is nothing. Maybe there is everything. Maybe we become the stars. Maybe we become the soil. Maybe we become the wind that moves through the trees on a summer afternoon. Maybe we live again. Maybe we love again. Maybe we get another chance to say the things we were too afraid to say. Maybe. That is all we have. That is all we ever had. IX. The Lesson Time flies so soon. We say it when we are young and do not mean it. We say it when we are old and mean it too much. Time flies so soon. The child becomes the parent. The parent becomes the grandparent. The grandparent becomes a memory. The memory becomes a name carved into stone. Time flies so soon. We do not know it until it is gone. We do not feel it until it is too late. We do not understand it until we are standing at the edge of everything and looking back at all the years we thought would never end. Time flies so soon. So hold your people close. So say the words you have been swallowing. So live like the clock is always ticking, because it is, because it always has been, because it always will be. Time flies so soon. And then— It is gone. X. The Return But here is the secret that no one tells you: Time does not fly. It stays. It stays in every moment you ever lived. It stays in every laugh, every tear, every sunrise, every goodbye. Time does not fly. We do. We fly through it like birds through an open sky, like rivers through an endless land, like poems through the mouth of someone who loves us. And when we are gone— when our bodies return to dust, when our names fade from memory, when the world moves on without us— time will still be here, holding everything we were, everything we loved, everything we meant. Time flies so soon. But love remains. So we remain. ZEAH ZITHRI / BJF