time makes you bolder

episode 2: even children get older, and I'm getting older too

I think everyone remembers their first heartbreak.

It’s a raw hurt that permeates into all that you feel, all that you consume, eat, drink, watch. Your stress hormones are fired, your heart flutters uncontrollably, and every minute is agonizingly long.

I vividly recall my first heartbreak, a now healed wound that’s still a little bumpy to the touch. I remember the pit in my stomach every morning waiting for a text that never came, frantically checking his location, last seen status, and rereading old messages like they were the words of God. I remember falling to my knees onto a carpet we had bought together in Ikea, heaving as hot, wet tears streamed uncontrollably down my face. I remember falling asleep pathetically holding my own hand, trying to remember what it felt like to have his in mine.

Shuddering, I blink the memory out of my brain, and as viciously as it consumes me, it disappears altogether. There is no pang in my chest anymore, no lingering of thoughts of him and of us.

I am tender. The ridges of that scar still remain, the only reminders of him coming alive when my fingers brush over them. My hand hovers over the metaphysical scar every now and again; one touch and About You by the 1975 would start to feel relatable again.

18 year old me would have dug her fingers into the wound. 19 year old me would have picked at it’s scab. 20 year old me tried to forget the gash even existed.

23 year old me, emboldened, balls my fingers into fists and shoves them into my pocket.

---

As a child, it felt like education was my calling. Sue me, the rumors were true, I was a teacher’s pet. My hand was always raised, annoyance regularly plastered on my face when the class was too rowdy, and homework finished neatly, correctly, and five days before it was due. Oh, and I probably asked for extra reading because I just wanted to. It was electrifying to learn, and to feel accomplished when those learnings were rewarded. A+B always equaled to C - study hard enough, pay attention enough, give it your all and you’ll reap the benefits. I graduated top of my class for a reason, right?

To have that love for learning so rudely crushed when going into university was an utterly demoralizing feeling.

It’s my final year of university and I am barging into the bathroom and sitting in a cramped toilet cubicle, the foul odor of someone’s digested breakfast permeating in the air. When I went into the exam room an hour prior, I knew it wasn’t going to be good, but I didn’t think it was going to be that bad. As I stared at the stall walls, my mind jumped to every horrible conclusion.

You’re going to fail this exam, and then fail this course, and then have to tell your parents you have to re-do a semester, and then they’re going to disown you, and you’re never going to get a job, and you’ll live your life as a fucking failure. You’re never going to make money, and everything you’ve ever worked for was for nothing because you couldn’t do

one

fucking

exam.

My eyes well up with tears and I can’t tell if its the putridity of the shit particles in the air or the supposed impending doom of my life. The spiral I go down deepens, my breathing quickens, sweat now gluing stray hairs to my forehead. There would be no job offers, no congratulatory remarks, no money in my bank account because I failed this one exam. I pick up the phone and call my boyfriend, his soft voice echoing from the phone.

“What’s up baby? How did it go?”

I burst into tears and explain that my life, in essence, is over. He’s heard this spiel one too many times, but still tries to reassure me. It isn’t working so well. I work to slow my breathing, though I can’t shake the stark image of my failure away.

In my head, the trajectory of my life was about to be tainted all because I couldn’t remember a damned formula. How could I ever make it right?

-

It’s more than a year after that exam, and looking up from my keyboard as I type this, I scan the cramped walls of my little desk cubicle, not unlike those of that bathroom. Life looks a lot different than what I had pictured.

I passed that class, I got a job, I saved money, I travelled. I learned more, lived more, and succeeded with the means that I could. My life is not exactly what I had hoped, but I look back on that girl in the bathroom with a warmth I can’t quite explain, knowing it isn’t the life she thought for herself either.

An iron to an ever-wrinkled shirt, time smoothed out each of my stubborn creases and put me on due course.

---

The blaring sound of my alarm rings from across my room. I bolt awake and lean over to find the phone, my heart pounding with panic until I can finally hit snooze. I fall back into the comfort of my duvet and close my eyes, dreading the next set of alarms to start their chorus.

A few minutes pass, and it begins again. As I finally shift out of bed, I plan out in minute-to-minute fashion how I’m going to survive the work day ahead.

10 minutes for coffee, and then 3.5 minutes to brush my teeth, 10 minutes to clear my bowels (ahem), 10 minutes for makeup. 5 minutes buffer time in all of this, then 5 minutes to pick and change my outfit. 3 minutes to get my bag together, and 2 minutes to leave the house. 1.5 minutes to walk to the bus station, and 40 minutes to work.

Then comes the 8 hour drag.

1.5 hours from the start of work till I can safely take a breakfast break without being too suspicious. 1 hour more and it’s lunch. 10 minutes of a walk to the restaurant, 10 to order, 5 to wait for the food, 30 to eat. 10 to pack up and pay, and 10 back to the office.

Another 4 hours to get to the end of the day, and I can release a breath. I turn my phone off Do Not Disturb, and my real day has just begun. 5 hours til I have to sleep, better make the most of it.

As I step outside the office, a few young girls in disheveled school uniforms laugh raucously as they pass me. I glue my eyes to them and feel my bones become heavier in my body, now consciously aware of the dull expression and slump in my shoulders.

I used to be them. That used to be us! We were kids once, with a lilt in out step and giddiness in our voices.

As a kid, school was a prison, the confines of which we could only escape post 3pm in the afternoon. Why do I have to wake up so early, I would complain, why couldn’t school finish at 2? Little did I know.

Little did I know what the shackles of adulthood would feel like. Now, there is nothing I crave for more than to feel like a student in school again. I want to feel stimulated intellectually, creatively, socially. I want to feel laughter without fear of what’s to come. I crave debates and even fucking Socratic Seminars and I want a friend group I call family, I want a feeling of community. I want to feel young again.

Even children get older, and I’m getting older too.

---

At the ripe age of 23, I have pondered how time has passed me by too many times to count. I often find myself at the visceral realisation that the years feel shorter as you get older because relative to the span of your life, a year becomes a smaller and smaller portion of it.

A year when you were 4 was 25% of your life. A year at 23 is all but 4% of your life.

As that percentage becomes smaller, I fear that time will become my enemy, the vicious antagonist as I cling to the hope of a hero’s arrival. The hero in question? A pause on time. Even if it’s just for a day or even a mere hour, I pray for a momentary halt where I can breathe and assess what the past 23 years has looked like before having to jump to the next thing.

I want to be able to look back on years of youth and learning. I desire to not just pause and reminisce, but actually reflect and renew. Finding myself making the same mistakes as I did 5 or 10 years ago is a slap in the face because if I had only had time to think it through, maybe things would have been different. If I only had more time.

The hero I had wanted was someone who forcefully held the hands of the clock in place, as I took a magnifying glass into the book of my life. It is only now that I’ve finally accepted the fact that my hero will never come, and time will continue to pass, as it has and as it will.

Time will embolden and it will transform. It will hurt and it will heal. And with it, we grow, we change, and we continue on. There are no heroes, and there are no villains in this story anymore.

---

sorry this was an absolute shitpost lol

til next time!