Time marches on

It seems that Time marches on without consulting me. I don't remember granting Time permission to turn me 23.

Oh, life.

Sometimes I look at pictures of people enjoying the places I once lived but now can't (Oxford, Moravian), and it tears me up a bit inside. I'm a horrible, chronic dweller--you'd almost think I enjoy it.

Slap a picture down in front of me of people in a kitchen in an old building by the city centre shopping mall (read: St. Michael's Hall, Oxford) and I'll turn nostalgic. Instead of seeing a funny kitchen, I'll remember the hue of the glaring, flourescent lights stinging my eyes during 2 a.m. refueling breaks; I'll see smiling, familiar faces and taste Lady Grey tea with a dab of milk and honey. I'll think of conversations, confessions and tears, and nearly collapse into laughter again as I picture a giant, mishapen cookie covered in neon-green icing.

It's like a talent, really.

Life at my alma mater moves on as well; this may be most strongly evidenced by my need to now refer to it in the Latin instead of the vernacular ("my school"). The glow of the orange streetlamps on Church Street are no longer mine; the obnoxiously loud church bell tower now rings without me. The sounds of cars drifting in through the window along with a sharp, cold breeze, too. (Winter was always paradoxically hot inside that dorm.) Circles of friends drift further apart or closer together as I watch--as I think of how long it's been since I've talked to any of these friends, whom I used to see on a daily basis.


And then I look back on all of these sentiments and feel downright silly.

How much more unfair the passage of time must feel when you're trapped in a nursing home bed by the feebleness of your own body. How much more helpless it must feel, lying there, contemplating the end. Feeling that it is come too soon, even though the days creep by with all the maddening sloth of the mundane.

Every time I think of it, it makes me downright sad. We did so much, more than most people; but in the end, it's still not enough, is it? It never is.