JEFF PEARLMAN

JEFF PEARLMAN

Time

I am obsessed by time. Really, the passing of time. Am I alone in this endeavor?

I think about it every day. How fast the seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months fly by. But perhaps they actually don’t go fast. Perhaps they are fast. We think of a year as 365 long days, yet is there a such thing as a long day? And if a day flies by, shouldn’t 365 days fly by? Shouldn’t an entire life fly by?

I think I started dwelling on this at my 20-year high school reunion a few months back. Twenty years. How did that happen? How did I get from there to here? I still feel 18, and sometimes 12. But I look in the mirror, and I have lines on my forehead, tiny blacks hairs peeking out my nose, a goatee that I could have never grown back when I was a teen. My hairline is receeding. My back and knees ache.

Aging wans’t supposed to happen to me. I witnessed it in others, but always like a movie. Then, one day, you realize you’re aging, too, and there’s no stopping the momentum. I yell and scream and beg the days to slow down, but I’m powerless. They keep rolling and rolling and rolling.

Damn.