Tonight feels different. Not because anything extraordinary happened. The world did not shift beneath my feet, the dishes are still in the sink, the streetlights still shine outside my window, and tomorrow is waiting on the other side of sleep, carrying familiar routines. And yet something inside me feels restless.
My thoughts drift in and out like passing clouds. Usually, I know how to quiet them; I find a distraction, a task, or a responsibility. But tonight, none of those things work.
I sit alone and sort through my thoughts, pulling them apart like tangled threads. I try to find answers, but every thought seems to create another question. They multiply faster than the answers.
My mind is never completely quiet. Never. Perhaps peace comes from learning to live beside the questions, from stopping the demand for certainty from the future.
I think that when we’re young, we live inside time without noticing it. We treat it like air, like something endless, invisible, guaranteed. Our parents seem permanent, our childhood house seems permanent, and so do holidays, traditions, voices, faces…we assume they’ll always be there in exactly the way they are. Then one day, we look back, and we realize those moments weren’t permanent at all. A parent gets gray hair, the dining room table gets smaller, not because it shrinks, but because fewer people gather around it. Life doesn’t announce its departures.
I suddenly want to remember my parents’ laugh from twenty years ago, or an afternoon that seemed completely ordinary at the time. I want to remember the way my grandmother folded napkins before dinner, the smell of my childhood home after it rained.
And I do remember …..I could almost touch these moments, and then I stop and wonder…
“Wait… where did it go?”
The strangest thing about time is that it never feels like it’s leaving while it’s happening.
Right now, I long for preservation. Not success, not achievement, not certainty….PRESERVATION. I want to keep people, to freeze moments before they disappear.
I wish there were something called FOREVER.
I want one room in this universe where nothing changes. Where my parents stay young, where my grandparents are still sitting at the dinner table telling the same stories they’ve told a hundred times, where every friend I’ve ever loved is still within reach, where my cat never grows old. I want a room where I never have to say goodbye.
I don’t know the future, but I do know that we are brave. We, humans, are brave. We know that life and love are colliding with time, and that collision hurts!
We are brave in ways we almost never acknowledge: we love people, knowing they will change, we raise children knowing they will leave, we adopt cats and dogs knowing we will outlive them, we build friendships knowing they may someday become memories….
We create traditions knowing one year will eventually be the last year.
And still….we love…. we choose to love.
We love anyway.
That’s courage.
I think about this often now, about how fragile everything is, about how temporary every conversation, every embrace, every season of life is. But life itself derives much of its meaning from its limits, isn’t it? Perhaps permanence is not what makes things valuable, but impermanence is. And yet, I still wish I could stop the clock sometimes, just for a little while. Stop it long enough to memorize faces, long enough to tell people that matter to me how much of my life exists because they existed first. I want to stop it long enough to say STAY.
STAY just a little longer.
But time has never listened to our requests; it keeps moving, and it always will. So maybe the answer is presence…is loving people so that their fingerprints remain on our souls.
Tonight, I still don’t have answers, the questions, ache, and uncertainty are still here. But so is something else. It is a realization that being human was never about escaping loss but it’s about finding the courage to love despite it. And if one day you find yourself awake at night, staring into the darkness, wondering where all the years went, know that you are not alone. I am wondering too, perhaps all of us are…..
We are travelers moving through time together, carrying our memories like lanterns against the dark, trying to keep what cannot be kept.
And yes, I wish there was something called FOREVER.
