A Year, Interrupted

When you’re young — and the thought of waiting even just ten more minutes for your parents to get ready for a day out at the zoo seems like a lifetime wasted — they tell you that time passes faster the older you get. You push that thought far back into the recesses of your mind and instead focus on ice cream and tigers and the way the sun felt on your skin that day. But if resurfaces some twenty-five years later or so again in a fleeting thought — ten years since school, where did the time go?

Still, you push it back, and farther this time. Something deep inside of you isn’t ready for this kind of depth on a rainy Wednesday afternoon watching the drops bead and tumble down the office window.

And then somehow all at once, time passes and it does not, as the world shuts down in a way you’ve never seen. Time is funny, you think to yourself as you pull up your mask on the subway careful not to touch the railings.

More of it passes, of that you are aware. Sand tumbling through glass. Dust crumbling in your hands.

You realise you never appreciated it when you could. And now you’re here looking back, wishing you could do it all again — maybe completely differently, probably exactly the same —you think about that day at the zoo again.

That day, back when ten more minutes felt like an hour. When just wait until lunchtime felt like a century.

Did your mind work faster back then or are you. simply. slowing. down?