SATC: Time Flies

As the end of the semester approaches, I can’t help but compare the present with the past and imagined future. What was I doing this time last year? What will I be doing a year from now? The time between spring break and summer vacation passed in the blink of an eye; everyone told me it would, but I didn't think too much about it. After all, I thought, I'll still have to live through the actual minutes and hours and days. The units of time won’t change, so how can it pass much faster? What I forgot to consider was the fact that the quantitative measurement of time is no match for the qualitative experience of living through it. As we get older, one year becomes a smaller percentage of our lifetime; 365 days feels shorter and shorter, even when number itself is not going down. Every day is not as novel of a discovery as it was when we were five, and so we do not always realize how quickly each one passes.If you asked me what I did last Tuesday, I would have a general idea, but might confuse it with the Tuesday before or the following Wednesday. When asked what I’m doing this weekend, I shrug and say, “We’ll see where the night takes us.”There is too much to do in one day for me to be actively paying attention to the passing of time. And yet, we are asked to think years in advance, to guess how we will be feeling when we graduate and enter the workforce when we can’t even think to the end of the week.Whether we are still in reading period or finals have actually begun (is there any real difference? I challenge you to find me one person whose reading period is being respected by every class), stress is in the air. And stress makes people do strange things. My friend Miranda finished the last of her reading assignments at 2 a.m. on a Thursday night, still slightly drunk. Last semester, someone I know stayed at the Rock until 7:30 a.m., and I fear for an escalation this time around.Trying to comfort an overwhelmed friend about his workload, I simply told him that, no matter what happens, time will continue to move forward. Understandably, he was a bit skeptical, but also relieved for a reminder that finals come and then they go, and time does not stop because of them. Stress, I have realized, changes our relationship with time. Either we want more of it, or we find ourselves begging for it to miraculously disappear. And our relationship with time changes our relationships with everything else. What happens when summer begins, when the people I’ve met here go back to their homes across the country? It feels almost pre-apocalyptic: if you knew these were last two weeks on earth, who would you want to spend them with? What would you want to do?As my friend Odette put it, “we just get swept up in the circumstances.” We forget both that time will continue to move forward and that, despite the urgency of our radical present, we’re not running out of it. We get swept up in the rush of time and the stress of separation. But summer vacation is not, in fact, the apocalypse. We will see each other again.It’s a strange balance, realizing that time doesn’t just stop in one place when I go to another one. Around me, people are assessing their relationships, deciding how to translate them into new circumstances. In the mad dash to the finish line, there’s a tendency to focus on the length of the distance rather than the duration. Time is forgotten, and we can neither hold on to the days as they pass nor can we speed through them.So, in attempt to not take time for granted, I am trying to slow down. In two weeks, I’ll land in Los Angeles, revel in the beauty of a non-dorm-room shower, and fail miserably to process the last year. I will think about the bookends of the school year: when I first got here and had a minor breakdown in the living-hell that is Bed, Bath, & Beyond, which my parents documented and posted on Facebook; these last days, spent with people who the panicking girl in the Providence Mall did not even know existed. I’m sure I’ll remember quite a bit, and I’ll be able to look back through journals in which I’ve recorded the last year (a habit that has inspired my friend Carly to affectionately identify me as the “manic pixie dream girl” of our friend group). But there is a lot that I won’t remember, and that’s terrifying in some ways. I wonder, though, if remembering everything would make it difficult to differentiate the important memories from the everyday ones.It’s like ephemeral art: however I might try to document and immortalize the time, nothing can ever truly reembody the actual experience. Or maybe time is like a kaleidoscope, all of our memories spinning around until they stop for a moment and focus into a mosaic of jewel-toned clarity. There’s beauty in that, I think. We will continue spinning, or time will continue spinning us. If I get dizzy, I'll just have to remind myself that the colors will pause again. If I get restless, I'll take comfort in the fact that soon, I'll be swept away by the circumstances.