Time.

It’s 5:00 in the morning. Darkness is all around me, only interrupted by my the light of my computer screen and the casual ramblings of Rory Gilmore on the television.

I turn 20 in under five months. Time terrifies me. It always has. It always will.

But maybe it shouldn’t. You see, I have always treated time as an opponent in my own race of life, and I can’t ever seem to catch up. Sometimes, I get close. I reach out my hand, but it flutters away into the distance.

But what if I just stopped running for a moment? What would happen?

It’s becoming clear to me that time isn’t linear. Every day, I experience a seemingly new memory from my childhood. A smell brings me back to the gym I trained in to prepare for tennis matches in elementary school. A song throws me right back to the nights I stayed at my grandmother’s home in Eupora.

Maybe that race I am running is in a circle. If I stopped for just a moment, time would run flat into my back. New memories appear, disappear, and the importance of the moments in my life seem to shift daily. No moment in time is ever over. I constantly reshape it in my mind as I go. And maybe that’s the beauty of time — it is never final.

There is a line in The Sound and The Fury by William Faulkner that reads, “I give this watch to you not that you may remember time, but that you might forget it now and then for a moment and not spend all your breath trying to conquer it.”

So here I am, awake early on a Monday morning on the Mississippi Coast, feeling like maybe I have lived this all before. Swirling around me is a collection of memories, stories, people….and here I sit, some lost kid trying to figure everything out. 20 years old or 2 years old, I think that will always stay the same.