retrospective

I lose time more than anything else in the world. From a very young age I felt the world rushing towards me. I was never impatient with time. I never found myself aching to be 16 or 21. Time itself, as a whole, moved at a decent pace. It was the smaller things like days and hours that seemed to stretch themselves out in front of me like mocking restrictions that kept me from that distant thing called "tomorrow" or "in a few minutes, honey." As a child, save for those precious and longing hours of impatience, time didn't matter much to me.

As an adult things are much different. I believe it was my senior year in high school when time seemed to speed up. One moment I was rocking out with friends, another moment preparing for The Honor Academy, another moment thrashing all my plans to the floor and... well, the next thing you know, my life is void of anything meaningful. It really happened that fast. There wasn't just one catalyst, there were many, and looking back it frightens me even more now than it did the first time.

But that's not what I want to talk about. I want to talk about now. I want to talk about the fact that a year ago exactly from right now I was sitting downstairs with my boyfriend at the time. I don't know what we were doing. Probably saying goodnight. And exactly a year ago from 9 o'clock this morning that same boyfriend called me because I was late for our biology final. (I am still trying to un-convince myself that the only reason for our relationship was to save my grades from imminent destruction.) And at the time, everything seemed slow. I was days away from my first trip back to the West Coast since going to college and the semester seemed to drag on like a dead body tied to the back of a truck.

And still, that is not now. You want to know what now is? Now is 1:37am and I have a 'final' in 7 1/2 hours. Now is 1:38am and I've just recently finished a conversation with my boyfriend and I swear... every time I talk to him... every time the conversation ends... I want to marry him more. I would do it right now if I had the option, and if it wouldn't complicate my education.

Time is just starting to speed up for me again. This semester practically flew by. These classes I'm taking are just days from being a little blip on my degree, minute little notes in my brain. Everything for the past four months has been a hurricane of love and laughter and I enjoyed every minute of it. Like I said, time is just speeding up for me again, and already I'm aching for tomorrow--for marriage, children, a career.

Does time ever slow down? When I have kids will my life of high-velocity slow down to their level? Or at least meet them half way? Will I be once again swept up in the everyday anxieties of a six year old whose pants are ripped, whose fingers are sticky, who gets picked on at school because he wears clothes from Goodwill?

Or...

maybe it gets faster from here. Maybe when I get married, today will feel like it just happened, and I will again wonder where the time was. (I should probably point out right now that I'm incredibly dizzy for some odd reason and the computer is floating around my desk... no, I'm not on drugs. Just tired?) Maybe by the time I have kids this will all feel like a distant dream. Time will move four times as fast as it is right now and before you know it I will be an old woman and then I'll be dead. My brain is already moving faster than my floating-keyboarding-hands can type. (Equilibrium is reeeally failing right now. I actually feel like the earth's gravitational pull has shifted and I am both moving towards and away from my desk. This type of thing used to happen to me all the time when I got in arguments over instant messenger.)

So I suppose the real dilemma is this: Do I lose time *more* than anything else, or just *faster* than anything else? I will ponder this more in my bed, or I may change my mind and say I lose sleep more than anything else.