will i run out of time? i am constantly concerned with running out of time.

i am concerned that my mind is melting, like a red root floater that has been pushed or pulled underwater. melt to my network of veins, and then to nothing. and that each day, if i don’t will myself to stay at the surface, i will melt a little bit more.

i have never been buoyant. i can tread water, but only for twenty seconds or so, and then i start to sink. i have friends who are uplifting, and i can help myself by holding onto them, but then i’m pulling them down with me.

do i need to be on the surface? this is a fair question. i have spent fifteen or so years existing already. and maybe my subconscious has already cast its vote. why do i keep bunnies and plants? these are weights. i keep them in order to sink. shouldn’t i have stopped treading a while ago? shouln’t i let my mind melt?

(i think this is normal. i think this is how a lot of people’s relationships with time are. )

i’ve already run out of time

i’m already stagnant

a deep option

when i was like 16 i read a bunch of murakami books, and the thing i liked most about them was that they showed passage of time more proportionally than other stories i’d read. the other stories would spend 40 pages talking about the events of an hour, then skip years at a time. this was not how i experienced time. in hindsight, sure, you remember fleeting memories. but when reading these stories comprising remote tiny islands of time, i felt insecure somehow. should i be having these vibrant moments that make everything else invisible in comparison? should i be maximizing the amount of them? if i don’t have them, will my story be empty? those are the questions i asked myself as i sat in the same classroom for the 150th day that year. but then i read murakami books, which were at least partly filled with people living lives. and it made me feel better, knowing that that kind of story exists.

in the same vein, in elementary school i tended to write time almost exactly proportionally. while it probably did occur to me that certain time periods warranted more description than others, i was maybe more guided by the principle of symmetry. story like diary, each day the same length of time, each day the same number of words. then you could, say, do sentiment analysis on it and you wouldn’t have to normalize the days by length or descriptiveness or anything. that definitely wasn’t in my head then. but the principle is worth something, i think.