Five More Minutes

It’s a funny thing. Time. The extent to which we keep track of it, hold it in our hands as a measure of our successes and failures. When we are young and naive, time stands still, creating barriers we are always pushing up against. We are five years old and yearn to be ten; we are ten and yearn to be teenagers. When we finally reach the awkward years of acne, body odor, and braces, we wish, to yet again, be older. Sixteen. We want to be sixteen so we can drive. Because time becomes a measurement of freedom. And then, we want time to go faster so we can be 18. We want to be 18 so we can break the chains that have held us down and told us what we could and couldn’t do. We want to pack up our life and move out of our parents’ house; a way of sticking it to them after devoting 18 precious years of themselves to us. We want them to know how much we can do without them, that we don’t need them. And screw them for thinking we ever needed them in the first place. Then. We get to be 21. We get to ditch our fake IDs and secret parties; parties where underage fools came alarmingly close to death. Where we would pour alcohol down our throats like we enjoyed it, mixing it with sugar to wash away the taste of misery. Then, we are 21. We no longer need to put our future at risk because of our desperate need to beat time. To be better than time. To tell time to go stick it where the sun doesn’t shine because time means nothing, and we can do and be whoever we want. Yes. Now, we are 21 and we can drink in public and sip martinis in style. Pretending we didn’t just spend the last, God knows how many years, stabbing beer cans with knives and downing the cheapest, most disgusting liquid on the planet as fast as possible. We want to be fast. We want to live fast. We want everything and anything and we want it in the palm of our hands now. Because we deserve it. We deserve it for years of living through the unbearable agony of our lives creeping by at a ridiculously slow rate. So horrible, the lives we lived. And we make up for it in our early 20s by living as dangerously as possible. Stupid, careless, completely indifferent to the world turning around us.

They tell you to slow down. They tell you, you will wish for time back, that if you waste it, you will live with regret. Regret that will pick you up and pull your strings from time to time; walking you in circles as if you were a puppet. Curling its lips in enjoyment as it buries its seed somewhere deep inside your soul. Only to emerge when it wants to break you down and remind you of the most precious thing in this world. Time. The one thing you thought you had more of. The thing you wasted. The thing you were supposed to keep safe, when instead you threw it around without a care in the world.

Then, they start telling you something else. They tell you not to focus on the time you lost, that it will only eat at you. That everything happens for a reason and there are no time machines, so you need to live. You need to live with the time you have and treasure it. And then, we get older. Much older. We have partners and babies, jobs and houses. Responsibilities piled so high we can barely see over the top. And we start to change, we start to understand how precious time really is. How fast it goes. And we want to hold it. Hold it tight in our hands, lock it in a box, and make it slow down. Please, we beg, slow down. We fall behind. We make mistakes. And we can’t get the time back. And sometimes, no matter how humble we become, we still want the time back. We want to go back just once to undo that one thing. That one thing that changed the course of our lives forever. The one thing that left us broken and misshapen. When it’s us who actually makes the biggest mistake, and not just because it was the hand we were dealt. We could have avoided it, could have prevented it. But we didn’t. Because we weren’t thinking. Still wasting our days with incessant dreams of being invisible and powerful and that everything happens for a reason. But sometimes, things don’t happen for a reason. They never should have happened at all. And you can bang your head against a wall trying to make sense of it all; trying to find the silver lining buried beneath the devastation. But it isn’t there. And then you function differently. Because time stops for no one. Not even a grief-stricken soul who would do anything to go back and do things differently. To do things better.

I am one of these people. One of these idiots who wasted so much time, someone who lost the one thing she loved more than anything else on this Earth. The one thing that made her whole and allowed everything to make sense. Made her feel like she had a purpose; that life was not just a miserable mess of “where do I belongs” and “who am I’s”. I was raised to believe I could do anything. I could be anything. That if I wanted it bad enough, I could achieve it, no matter what. That I was worth loving. Worth living for. Worth falling asleep next to; an arm tucked around my waist as I lay safe and warm, lost in our love. But now, I know that cannot be true. I cannot possibly be those things, and also have done what I did. The mistake that lead to the end. The end of him. The end of our love. The end of everything I ever knew because I didn’t know how badly I would wish to go back in time. Change my fate. Change his fate. All of it. If I could have just five more minutes. Five more minutes to make the decision I knew I should have made; the one that was in my gut. The one I knew was right. If I could do that, it would change everything. And I would have him back.

And we would have time.