Time

Twenty-three years old. I am now twenty-three years old. Where did the time go? I just graduated. How did it slip past my line of vision? My eyes were open the whole time. Thinking back, when did my twentieth year happen? My twentieth year? I don't even remember it, wasn't I here the whole time? Who did I meet then? I'd have to sit down and really think about it. How can something as elusive as time be rushing by me at breakneck speed? Twenty-three?

I heard it all the time. "Never get old, Jonny," Grandma and Pop Pop would tell me. They were right. I don't feel the effects of age yet, not even slightly, but I know time's knock will come to my door as fast as my high school graduation day came and went--I day I often thought about in my school-age life--but did I ever really believe it would come? By the time it did, the day was over, leaving me to ponder, five years later, the effects and characteristics of time from that point til now.

Every direction is a battlefield. I walk through and it hurts, somewhere deep down in my cells. They are dying, regrowing, aging. I have long since given up on a solution. As I take each step, I receive blow after blow, death after death. The casualties to my body don't stop. It's a battle I understand, but don't really know. Like minions to a master, Time has seconds and minutes and hours. When those are not enough, the days and years and decades will never fail in reminding me of their unending clench. Its hands never stop harassing me. Its fingers never stop ticking at me. Time scratches me with lines that crawl their way around my eyes and forehead. It stains the colors of my hair. It pulls at my skin and weakens the makeup of my bones. There is no place I can go without being found, no place I can hide without being seen.

Though it's my enemy, it caresses me into sleep every night. Like a friend, it wakes me up with the hope of a new day, a fresh slate that is soon stained by life, slowly seeping through the white linen of my conscious memories to remind me its a week day, or my car died, Grandma and Pop Pop are dead.