Ticking Clocks

Can You Hear It Ticking?

The difference between ages 1 to 2 is monumental. 2 to 3 you start becoming a human. Age 4 grows you, age 5 grows your curiosity, and suddenly you're running. Every year passes slowly because you are able to appreciate it. Duties don't cloud the beauty of the world and the speed of responsibility has yet to rush the universe around you. By age 11, you've experienced the whatever tiny chunks of your world you needed to experience to survive, so now you start living. Your teens are filled with laughter and love and loss and sorrow and somehow you notice you're 14. Age 15 leads straight into age 16 until you stumble upon 17 and 18 and then out of nowhere you're 21 and out of school and away from anything you've ever truly loved. The world is big and round but your heart is too busy pounding from the anxiety of age to notice. Instead, you notice the world's pulse. Each thud brings and takes a year, age 25 comes and goes, and then you get to 30. Life skips. You go from 30 to 40 so fast that you can't even process the sweet thuds of the world's heart beating years away because you are focusing on your inability to regain the beats that have already thumped. And before you know it you go from 40 to 60 just like that because anything in between is just a "middle-aged" blur and then you're dead.

The difference between age 10 and 15 is immense, but 40 to 45 is just a tap. A blink. A tiny skip in the span of your life spent panicking and in crisis because you know that 45 to 50 will be exactly the same and then you notice you are no longer moving in increments of 5. 50 fades into 60 and then suddenly you're in retirement and then you're 80. How did 5 years turn into 20 so fast? Life isn't short. It is, put simply, a sequence of memorable milestones that no one truly cares about but you. And no one will ever understand like you. It is long only until you notice that it was getting shorter and shorter right under your nose.