Alyssa Skyes

When life is uneventful or monotonous, time can seem painfully slow. It can stretch unbearably thin, each day, or even the seconds, dragging on as though we're stuck in a world of molasses.

 

Yet in adventure and chaos, time rushes by and is never something we can quite catch. If you have lived a life of extreme happenings, you may frequently look back and feel you have lived many years within those moments.

 

And then there are those rare moments when something begins to unfold that threatens to shatter your world, demanding your entire being to stop it. In those seconds, time halts altogether, trapping you in its stillness, paralyzed by the urgency of your need to move or react. Your heartbeat pounds like the drums of eternity, and is perhaps the only sound you can hear.

 

The most dramatic encounters with time are almost always seared into memory. They remain crystal clear.

Maybe that’s why I remember so much of my childhood. It was riddled with constant change, extreme challenges and adventure, making it unforgettable.

 

I was born into an eventful life, one that unfolded without any doing of my own, yet sculpted me from the start.

Sometimes, on the wings of an old melody, a distinct sound, a scent, or even a particular temperature of the breeze, I travel back through time, as far back as my childhood, and relive moments that will no longer exist once they are completely forgotten.

 

Some of the time allotted to me for this journey has stayed behind in the many countries, along the borders and highways, and within the countless houses I have lived in and traveled through. Many of my moments in time are scattered in the different colored soils, climbing up vines or down into near-empty swimming pools filled with frogs. Some remain in the shallow reefs of the Dominican Republic, others in the stone walls across from the volcanoes of Guatemala, and some grow among the blackberries of Costa Rica. Some of my time is frozen in the Ob Sea, other moments hanging off apartment buildings in Siberia. And some still catch the perfect ocean breeze from the shores of Mexico, where those moments are returned to me over and over.

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Sometimes, coming back from certain destinations, I felt as though I were returning from another planet. Even now, I find myself singing Keane’s words, “everybody’s changing and I don’t feel the same,” not knowing whether the world has changed with time, or if it's simply that time has changed me into something else.

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But little by little, through this life’s relentless movement, I have come to find my own relationship with time: Do as much as you can while time still holds you. 

 

This mantra has carried me through, leaving me with the sense that I’ve lived a multitude of lifetimes within these short years, more than reason could ever account for.

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My childhood, and my life so far, have been a treasure trove of experiences so rich and varied that I cannot stop pondering them. An endless movie of adventure and terror.

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But that is how it has been, and that is time for you: fluid, wild, unpredictable, and absolutely never guaranteed.