I don’t know when it started feeling like this. This sense that I am always running out of time. That the hours are rushing past me even as I try to hold them in my hands. I wake up, I go through the motions, and suddenly another day is gone. And I keep asking myself, where did it go? Did I even live it, or did I just watch it disappear?

Lately I’ve been thinking about how much I miss the feeling of endless time. The way afternoons used to stretch forever when I was younger. How I could spend hours doing nothing and it never felt wasted. Now everything feels like it’s slipping through some crack I can’t seal. Even when I pause, even when I tell myself to breathe and be here, the moment is already half gone.

There’s this ache inside me, one I don’t even know how to explain properly. It’s part nostalgia, part fear, part longing. I look back on memories and I want so badly to crawl back into them. Just to sit there again. To feel safe in their simplicity. To not carry this constant weight of time sprinting forward without me.

I try to keep up. I plan, I make lists, I tell myself I’ll use my time better. But even then, it feels like I’m falling behind. Like no matter how much I do, it will never be enough. There will never be enough hours, enough days, enough years. And that thought just makes the nostalgia sharper, because it reminds me that what’s gone is gone, and what’s coming will slip just as quickly.

Sometimes I wonder if everyone feels this or if it’s just me. If other people manage to move through their days without this constant awareness of the clock ticking. Without the guilt of not living fully enough, not holding onto things tightly enough, not being enough for the time they’re given.

I don’t have a neat conclusion to this. I don’t know how to wrap it up. I just know that I feel time slipping away from me. I feel it in my bones. And no matter how much I try to clutch at it, I can’t seem to make it stay.

*****

From my mind to this page to your screen— thanks for being here.

~ Devika