My parents would always say,

            “Time flew by.”

Looking back for many adults, is to see the escaping time of childhood, days gone before you knew they had long past you. When you are older, I suppose ten years here or there does not seem like much to someone who has lived maybe decades but to me, somehow nearing my second decade of life, which still seems so far away but in reality it is not.

            In the middle of a transitional time in my life, I look back and remember much of my childhood and even remember thinking, it will always be like this. I will be a kid. I am sure that everyone thought that way at one point in time. Strangely though, I am struck heavily with deja vu because as a child I would think, in what felt like a hundred years, a number that had no weight to me back then; I would look back upon my childhood and think of what it was like to be a young child. That perhaps I will think back to it and realize, wow, it is gone.

            The time flew by.

            Looking back now, feeling heavy with the same thought process that my much younger mind had pondered I think and wonder if time truly did fly by. I may think that in twenty years still but not now. I think.

            To think that time flew by, I feel that that if admitting to not getting enough out of that time. To let it fly past is to let it slip out of your fingers, it sounds like many empty and unfulfilled years.  I don’t think it has flown by; I can still look back and remember a particular long summer or the struggles of an early class. To me, time that escapes me is whenever I am in the mountains because time truly does escape you up there but down here, I was all too aware of time passing. I knew of this future coming but preferred not to think about it except in daydreams of momentary comments and thoughts.

            While I was younger, I was really aware of the passing time and I know that I enjoyed it. Now, nearly 18, this year has felt surreal as I return to my early thoughts on the passing time and the coming years. It all seems so strange and I want to escape this feeling because I am on the edge of two different lives- caught on the cusp between childhood and adulthood. It is a nasty balance, easy to be pitched to either side but I wish to progress but that wish makes me realize the past that is gone. The past that had happened and I don’t think it flew by… I think it aged with me.