We spend childhood wanting to grow up quickly. Adolescence wanting to become adults at last. Then the best years of our lives counting the days until Friday.
We wait for vacation. For summer. For Christmas. For payday. We wait for that fucking day, so heavy it feels impossible to bear, to finally end.
We are always asking time to run, as though we were doing it a favor, as though boredom entitled us to a fast lane.
Then something happens that changes our minds completely.
You fall in love. A friendship begins that tastes like eternity on its first day.
You leave on a journey you will never forget.
You laugh until your stomach hurts.
You hold someone you never want to release.
And suddenly you change your mind.
“Stop.”
“Just five more minutes.”
“Do not leave so quickly.”
But time does not give a fuck. It listens to no one. It could not care less whether you are living the finest day of your life or the most miserable.
Perhaps that is its cruelest form.
It does not distinguish tears from laughter. It will not slow for a kiss or the best sex of your life. It will not speed up for a funeral.
It simply moves. With the same exact fucking indifference, whatever you may be asking of it.
We spend our lives chasing it like idiots.
We complain that the days never end, only to look in the mirror one morning and wonder when the gray hair appeared, the wrinkles, the face growing steadily more like our father’s or our mother’s.
No one tells you that one day you will look at an old photograph and feel as though you are watching the life of a stranger.
That certain places now exist only in memory, that some people will go on living only inside a faded image.
Time does not carry away only the years.
It takes the chances.
The words you never said.
The calls you postponed.
The embraces you took for granted.
The people you assumed would be there “tomorrow too.”
The truth is that we continue behaving as though we were immortal.
We postpone a journey.
A dream.
An “I love you.”
An act of madness.
A photograph.
As though we had signed a contract with the universe.
Spoiler: there is no contract.
Then you meet the face of an old man.
And understand something.
You are not looking at old age.
You are looking at time.
You see it carved into skin, eyes, hands.
Every wrinkle is a day that won.
Every white hair a page turned without asking permission.
And there you realize the greatest joke in the whole story.
Time is not taking our life away.
It is life.
We are simply naive enough to notice only after using up a good part of it.
Perhaps we should stop asking time to run.
And stop begging it to stand still.
Perhaps we should have the courage to do something infinitely more difficult.
Inhabit the moment.
Because one day, before we even realize it, someone will pick up an old photograph of us, look at it for a few seconds, and think:
“Look how young they were.”
And the most absurd part is that while the picture was being taken, we were probably already saying:
“Jesus, what a drag… when will this day be over?”
