here’s the really special thing about growing up a little. you become a little bit more unrecognizable to yourself everyday. older pictures of you start looking strange and you wonder why you stuck with that unflattering hair color for so long. you wonder what might look strange about yourself now to you a year from now, a month from now, a week from now. time is starting to get a little faster, if not a dash already, and now there’s this sense of urgency. it’s this little power i didn’t have before. a few months before turning 22, i discover agency. and it’s beautiful.
i had the kind of adolescence that was lanced with misery to the point that i got comfortable with it, a bed of nails, of sorts. staying still, like a prey in grass, felt like my safest move and eventually, when the hunt got called off, i didn’t have the sense-memory to get up again. until recently— i think a muscle twitched, or a nerve died and i remembered i can actually move. it’s nice reacquainting myself with it: letting myself move in this world properly. doing things for the sake of it, building better habits because i somehow can now. i purposely take the longer, more inconvenient, scenic route to classes nowadays. i’ve realized how much of an indulgence time can be, while i’m still young. a few months before turning 22, i discover how little time i have left to waste. and i almost can’t waste it enough.
i look back at my sorry little pockmarked teenage-hood, and i realize my gravest sin was never that i was too weird, too sad, too chronically uncool. it was that i never took pleasure in how much time i wasted, and i wasted lots of it. without care, without abandon, blind to the luxury of it simply because i had so much time at all. it felt neverending. im slowly waking up to the fact that it does, in fact, end someday. and that day might be soon, and somehow an extra ten minutes of meandering around little streets to get to class, reckless and inefficient, feels wonderful. simply because you have these ten minutes to waste at all.
last year, i spent a lot of time in close quarters with someone who spoke about their job quite a bit. and i heard about hours on the clock, and rota’s, and shifts, and unpaid breaks— and while i was fascinated, i was idiotically horrified for the first time. this sudden realization that your time cannot be yours to spend. more often than not. it’s that little trap everyone falls into simply because a job takes up so much of your time. it’s all you know for most of your days, for decades on end. and if i’m dangerously close to sounding anti-capitalist and very edgy in a 2000s way, i will take the extra second to make an apology. but when you sit with what the phrase ‘time-theft’ really means, it’s sort of daunting. soon, something that is so intrinsic to you- time- belongs to an entity for eight hours a day, and it’s no more your time to waste than the strangely overqualified cashier in the corner. you are minutes on a sheet, efficience.
i want to savor those minutes for myself while i can. im in this lofty, privileged position of my time belonging to just myself for only a little while more, and i want to cherish it while they’re mine. so, i take an extra breath, and i let myself take two hours of the day to swim whenever i can, i look into cafés and i visit them with friends, and i open the windows out wide to the blue sky. everything has become so precious to me.
for as much time i spend steeping in sadness, in crumbs, in hunger and emptiness, i spend as much time happy to be living through all of it at all. how wonderful it is, that at 2pm on a wednesday afternoon, i have the allowance to spend my time looking at a magpie patter about on wet, leafy ground. all of these people around me have taken a little pocket out of their time too, to be here, just like me. and someday, i shall be them, escaping stale office air to take in the smell of fresh dewy grass. in conjunction: for the days i spend on end seeping into my mattress, for the hours of sun i keep out of my room, for all of the time that is yawning, clawing darkness— the time is still mine. and there’s a very peculiar comfort in that. when all of my time is still mine, i’ve learnt to choose to spend it on nicer things. hedonistic sometimes, very refined other times.
either way, i’ve come to look at all of it as a conscious decision to live. each time. the good and the bad. especially the bad. it’s better than not having the choice at all, before life becomes a simulacra of freedom and i no longer have time to waste.
