Evalyn Linnert

I only have a few more moments like these left.

Only a few more moments.

It took me a while to figure out exactly how the weeks seem to drag on and fly by, how the months turn to years before my eyes.

What it took me four years to figure out, though, is that time passes in moments. 

Not in seconds or decades or hours. It’s not a blink of an eye, like I once thought.

Time passes in moments.

That’s how I can sit in the same chair months apart and suddenly realize the days have slipped through my fingers. That’s why I try to write it all down, photograph each day, and notice the song playing in the background. 

These moments aren’t predictable. It’s not the big events or the ongoing stream of “lasts” that are marking my time. It’s the random handful of times when I suddenly wake up and take it all in.

The picture-perfect moments, golden, untouchable, framed forever in my mind. When the sun turns into glitter on the lake, when my iced latte is my preferred ratio, when I make my best friends laugh. When my surroundings go from beautiful to cinematic. When the music perfectly matches the setting.

These moments stick with me. They stick out in the mundane, slightly more saturated than the gray of each day. Sometimes it’s as simple as a chirping bird. Something that removes me from life. Someday, these will be the moments that I remember—the fleeting, rapid feelings with little anticipation and significant impact.

For all I know, this could be the final “moment” of summer. The one that sticks. Sitting with my iced chai, writing this column. Perfectly content, soaking in the end of summer and the middle of August. Before the school year speeds by, and I leave you behind. Before I’m an adult, before college, before it all goes down. You’ll be by my side for the next nine months, and then I will be forced to write my goodbye.

Though I wish time were more careful, less merciless, more forgiving, less brisk, more leisurely, I know it’s for the better. Otherwise, time wouldn’t heal me the way it does now. I’ll be okay, whether tomorrow lives in the gaps between moments or becomes the reference for all of my future nostalgia.

I only have a few more moments, so I’m glad I figured it out sooner rather than later. This moment, this story, marks the beginning of senior year. It’s strange to write those words, and even stranger to know they are true. 

Only a few more moments.