Somewhere embedded in me, a feeling lives eternally.
For as long as I can remember, I have been longing for something of ebullience: a profusion of memorandums to occupy the space of today and to evoke the same reminiscence as I grow older. My mind has yearned for anamnesis of the past. Somewhere, in some predetermined place dedicated to my love, a grove of recollection corroborates the lingering wish of fulfilling some utopic, effervescent life. In my biggest fears lies the notion of time passing me by without leaving its beautifully bittersweet aftertaste on my heart.
With the flicker of my tapered birthday candles and the unabating flash of a camera on every first day of school, it has been all too expeditiously that I have turned from 5 to 10 and now almost 16. It sounds unfitting to be here, despite my long wait for these all-too-quickly approaching moments. Was it not just last month I was only 4 with pleading fists that ardently begged my mother to be able to go to school? Was it not just last week I was 10-going-on-11 and patiently awaiting my first palindrome birthday? It had to have been just yesterday that I was 14 and taking my first steps into what will adjourn as a tumultuously wonderful four-year journey.
It doesn’t seem real, sometimes, the lithesome ways of time.
It slithers past me; slow at first, but always too fast in the end. It spins a girl around and shapes her into someone new, someone different, someone changed. Her dark hair is now tinted by the faded hue of hair dye. Her closet has absorbed the taste of the world’s changing clock. She is molded by everything around her, a catalyst for the Earth’s rotation to shine upon.
Yet, eternally and unyielding, the hands of the clock march on in their rhythmic tick, tick, tick.
If I give the grip of time a chance, it could hold me down. Its unbowed fingers will coil me at noon, and the triad of the second, minute, and hour hand—provided the opportunity—will whisk me into their monotony by the time the clock strikes midnight. Soon enough, my ears will have become accustomed to the sound of the clock.
Its beat lulls me to sleep.
Its beat lulls me to wake.
The gravity its pulse holds lies asphyxiated in the lake as I sit with my feet dangling over the dock. Some banished thought inside me begs me to jump in, to feel the waves and question them of the memory they carry with them. They whisper the tales of the sandy shores they have met and invite me to sit with them in the estuary, drinking in the sun from above. I can almost touch its warmth, its burn, and everything in between. The duality of the human being skimming my fingertips.
A pair of eyes dig into my back, latching onto my shirt and dragging me back into the bunker of the clouded world I want so desperately to depart from. Its heavy words lie on my shoulders, the ones that assure me that it is better to be comfortable than to be vivacious. It is better, it tells me, to sit in conformity and smile for the camera, which flashes only for unbridled validation from the world around it.
Take another picture, I say, I don’t look good in this one. Take another picture; something is off. Take another and another and another until I exist only to pose in a world where my purpose lies in statuesque beauty admired but never truly alive; I am stone cold and whittled away to a leaden perfection, poised forever in my one single substantiality.
Yet the tick, tick, tick bubbles up to the surface, and a realization grabs me by the ankles and tugs me into the vastness of the sea.
The claw marks on my back—a defacement from every version of me that came before—sting with fear, love, hate, and some messy cacophony of the girl who was, the girl who is, and the girl to come. She wants not to leave her footsteps behind for a new world to idolize, nor for the path of her excursions to sit on a pedestal. It is not some burdened glory that lies buoyant in her wildest dreams or an untroubled reality. She craves only to look back on life and know the feeling of living: every side of its rolling die, every slope of its sweeping hills, and every turn of its tides.
The end of life, she has now realized, seems to come much sooner than death when the only road explored is a flatline.
Somewhere embedded in me—sutured in the stitches that mend together the scar of trial and tribulation and amongst an unfailing desire for melancholic satisfaction—lies both this molded consciousness and the only eternal truth that I know to be certain:
To have lived is to be changed.
