I hope you find this as vague yet faerie as I do.

 

"There is a certain aspect in life that is like an arrow in the heart for some and at the same time a source of comfort for the heart. It has a limited amount of share for everyone and no one receives it equally despite their true iridescent being and soul. It slips through our knowledge and like sand falling through closed fingers, it is undeniably ungraspable. What is it? You say. It is the measure of life. It is time.

 

To this day, I still remember that one vivid memory in sixth grade where I happen to run into the realisation that life began to unravel faster than when it used to be. It was when I decided to bury my face into my arms while waiting for the other kids to finish their math assignments. I closed my eyes and attempted to imagine the life I might have to familiarise myself with once I leave Oman – which is a country I’m grateful to have lived in for my childhood, and once I return to Indonesia. What I saw that day and what I pulled myself away from looking, was something I was rather afraid of receiving. I then looked around me and stared at the faces and the features of the friends I have made that I was unlikely to meet again within days after my departure. Then I looked at classroom 6B and to the teacher who’s been so patient with all of us; to the uniform I was wearing and the table I was sitting in. Strangely after, a wave of panic and uncertainty quickly washed over me –it was more terrible than the wave I felt when my dad went to the hospital in a sudden critical condition, and certainly more terrible than the wave of not receiving primary school love in return. But that wave soon slowly evanesced into sea foam and it did not wash me away.

 

Because I was still here. And like what Czeslaw Milosz wrote, those three words contain all that can be said – you begin with those words and you return to them. Here means on this continent and no other, in this city and no other, and in this epoch I call mine, this century, this year. I was given no other place, no other time, and I touch my desk to defend myself against the feeling that my own body is transient. This is all very fundamental, but after all, the science of life depends on the gradual discovery of fundamental truths. I am here – and everyone is in some “here” – and the only thing we can do is try to communicate with one another.

 

Miss Elizabeth then called my name and had only noticed I was finished by then, and I see everyone else again and every wave collapses and became mere sea foam. Now whenever I bury my face into my arms and close my eyes in attempt to imagine the life I might face after a certain major transition, which I last experimented at ninth grade, I only feel sea foam of disappointment. Though they are many in number, they are weak in force.

With that, I began to study time in a quiet manner as a means to not be noticed by it. In my seventeen years on this earth, I came with a conclusion which I believe. And it is that time is simply running faster because we perceive it as so, and because we simply begin to acknowledge its talent of increasing its velocity once we finish a set of puzzle, or a school week, or a whole summer. We only realise what we once had when we no longer have them. Though time seems unequal in its share to others, I believe it is just for reasons we may not know now. And we do not need to know now."

Love always,

Zahra Thania.

*do listen to some Vancouver Sleep Clinic to love vagueness and uncertainty the same way I do*