Time flows quickly in this universe, it slinks and slithers quietly, like a winding lazy river.
A bloody mary spilled across the canvas, staining everything a rusty brown,
like iron left to oxidize and in the sun.
The ocean, a vision of tranquility glowing underneath the jagged
sharpness of the cliffs that life likes to stab you with, every so often.
Memories may persist, they may stay with you for eternity,
but your sense of how life slips away only seems to grow with you.
Of how time slips away with the fluidity of dry sand in an hourglass.
Slipping through the cracks in your fingers. Time is relative,
melting together as your experiences become too close to differ.
Like the best chocolate cake you’ve ever had. Decadent, rich with bloomed cocoa, Italian
espresso, and browned butter. Perhaps it was your seventh birthday.
Now, it’s your tenth and you still reminisce about that piece of chocolate cake,
decorated sparsely by seven pink candles and a rim of rainbow sprinkles.
Suddenly, you’ve run forty-nine laps around the sun.
You can count the wrinkles on your forehead and the hairs on your head.
Maybe, you still distinctly remember the aroma, the taste,
the moist yet crumbly texture of that one chocolate cake.
You even remember it was your birthday.
Yet the number of candles sticking proudly in the cake during that quintessential moment
has escaped you.
Was it the fifth? The sixth? The ninth?
You can’t recall.
Time makes everything insignificant,
like how you only have a finite time on this planet.
It could be two days, it could be fifty years.
But you look back and realize that time keeps memory.
Even when you have forgotten, time never will.
The melting clock faces, usually so strong and unbendable, flow like liquid.
The plummeting rock faces grow on either side of you,
as those finite days count down.
Impenetrable–how you are set up to fail.
It’s why your pale, wrinkly face lies covered by the slimy, slippery clock,
why the sitting fly has your shadow,
a human shadow.
In the eyes of time, you are miniscule.
Those years started off slow, didn’t they?
Then they melted together in the crash of a single, foamy wave,
then they melted together in the single tug of your hand as the fork slid out of your mouth
and the chocolate cake touched your tongue for the first time.
Did you notice how quickly you were moving?
How does the sharpness in your memory fade as time laps you in a race you cannot win?
How will you see your life?
Was it an undistinguishable blur, or was it a timeless memory forever etched into stone?