I can feel my life moving like many waters between my fingers. I’ve done the math (or at least the vaguest sort of estimation that an English major can muster): almost a quarter of my life is gone. I don’t want to waste the rest of it. I’m scared that I’m not living enough.

You know, a dear friend once told me that time passes more quickly as you age. When you’re, say, five and you turn six, that year you’ve just lived out was one-fifth of your short little life. But the years grow shorter, pass by more quickly. You plan more for the future because it’s coming faster. It becomes just another year come and gone. It’s a sunburnt summer, then suddenly, it’s Christmastime again.

Please stop. Please just see the underbellies of leaves moving in the wind. Please just touch the quivering surface of a puddle of rainwater. Please just breathe in the scent off your own skin. Please just be. For a moment. OK?

Maybe you think I’m just trying to be “deep,” or melancholy, or perhaps, you wonder if I’m insane even (don’t worry, we’re on the same page in that regard). Yeah, maybe it’s strange that I’m thinking so morbidly when I’m still so young. Honestly, it’s OK if you think I’m weird. I don’t care. Just please make time for wonder. Make time for awe. You look like this. You’re in this precise time for some reason. I want to wake up every morning, no, I want to breathe every breath, taste every moment with that joy on my lips. I am here. Oh, I am here. I am now.

And the present is so full it aches. It becomes a foreign concept, a word repeated over and over until it becomes lost and its meaning is gone. It falls on deaf ears eventually. Do you understand how real and true right now is? What a gift. It gives me a kind of vertigo. I’m grabbing at every moment, hungry to remember because it is in the remembering that time must pause. Life must be handled like this: a daily seeking of the little things, a savoring of the moments piled up like pennies. Because, when it comes down to it, this is a life-or-death-situation (yup, you’ll have to forgive me, that pun was quite intentional). And I know you want me to boil it down to a sentence. A single word. But this is something so immense, a feeling, a moment, so complete and pregnant that I cannot do that for you. You will simply have to find it out for yourself. I will tell you that it is like a shadow that you cannot see when you look directly at it, some trick of the light. It is like humbleness or happiness in that respect: the minute you try to get a firm grip on it, it flits away.

I can feel my life beneath my palms like so many silken threads. And it’s unraveling too fast.