Time Flies When You’re Living Life

“God, I was just nineteen,” I said with a sigh of shock and a look of puzzlement. I couldn’t perceive how the years since undergrad had rolled by so quickly.

My younger sister, who was turning twenty-four soon, cut off my sigh to proclaim the truth with a bit of teasing tied into it. “No, you weren’t.”

It was true. Nearly nine years have passed since I was in my teens. And although I am constantly mistaken for a young college student, it has been years since I even stepped foot on a University campus. I had been hanging out with friends, that I didn’t know, but that I had been around for years now. I then thought back to all the people who I used to hang out with who have just become passing Instagram posts on my phone screen.

Life was flying by fast. Sunsets continued to fall below the horizon at a rate which matched a blink that married two rows of eyelashes together every other second. I could wake up in the morning for a cup of coffee and realize, in the next moment, that half of the day was already gone.

“It felt like we just brought in the New Year and now June is ending. It’s officially summer,” I told another friend. “I’m quickly trying to check off tasks on my list of New Year’s resolutions before the next flashes of sunsets whiz by.”

A multitude of changes, events, accomplishments, and tasks checked off lists has occurred since I the age of nineteen. However, I can’t help but dwell on all the things that I haven’t done yet. I think back to the nine years that seemingly flew by between the ages of nineteen and twenty-seven (and some change) and I wonder if the next nine years will feel the same.

When the ticking second hand on the clock spins around the face like that Skip-It from the nineties on the loose, and the days zip by like the lights on a Bop It toy, you begin to worry about the amount of time you’ll have to get things done.

People say that millennials are so nostalgic because we have grown up alongside the birth and the rapidly changing evolution of the Internet and all its technological advances, and I can agree with this firsthand. As a millennial clinging to the days of annoying dial-up tones and dead Tamagotchi, I may be a little more hyper-aware of how quickly life flies. Perhaps, these newer generations of humans will feel a little more rushed to squeeze all their goals and dreams into the swiftly moving stream that is the human lifespan.