Where does the time go? The last hour, the weekend, the month, the year, your life?

How are our lives so long and so short all at once? Blink and it will be over. I want to stop blinking.

But of course I can’t. They’re right, the older you get, the faster life goes. I imagine when/if I have kids they’ll be adults in an instant. I’ll be old and grey and those I know and love will disappear, one at a time, maybe before me, maybe after I go. Who knows.

Sometimes memories paint themselves in rapid fire on my tongue, as if they were just moments ago: a road trip in college to a Michigan festival; the lights rising on the stage, specific song playing, my lips parting to begin a monologue, the words still ready to be spoken; first seeing my boyfriend at callbacks for a community theatre production, now over eight years ago, him in his long black coat pacing back and forth across the room seriously studying his audition script.

All of these moments, even further back, from high school and middle school and elementary school and even the foggy ones before, are long over, they are part of all the things that make up who I am today, yet I hunger to return to my youth to make more of it, to make something of it. To not be so afraid and sad and lost.

That’s life. I want today to make the most of now. But time ticks on. It flees from my grasp. I let it go too easily. And I know just a few of these many moments more I’ll be confronting my last breath, like we all do. How do I make more of life between now and then?