“Fruit flies like a…” I paused, embarrassed that I messed up the saying. “Time flies like an arrow, fruit flies like a banana.” He laughed and I smiled.
Ever since I started this relationship, I’ve been thinking of time. Maybe it’s because I’m finding myself with less of it… or it’s because my boyfriend and I have been talking about it. You see, he’s made a somewhat strict schedule for himself and I definitely don’t. While I do have classes and work at specific times, the rest of my day I clean, do homework, hang out with friends, sleep, basically whenever I want to.
He says that I’m trying to catch up with time. And to a certain extent, I am. I procrastinate and am forced to do homework in a rush, I hurry to clean when company is coming over. I sometimes don’t have time because I got distracted (being a typical college student, it’s often Netflix).
I do sometimes wish that I was better at organizing. Because after all, time is one thing that we can’t get back. It keeps on going, whether we like it or not.
But to take a hopefully fresh look at the cliche, I want to be a river and I want to go where the waves take me. I live like I do because I like it. It allows me live in the tiny moments instead of worrying about the future.
Today in class, we were discussing The Ruin, an Anglo Saxon poem describing the ruins of ancient Bath. The poem is eerie and fragmented, itself in ruins. It is not only eerie because that is the nature of ruins, but also it eerie because the Anglo Saxons, whose culture, buildings, and artistry has been excavated from ruins, saw and were affected by the remnants of those who had gone before.
Time has always passed by humans. It is the nature of time and of mortality. But what we do in those small moments and those big, life-changing moments are the things in matter.
So let’s live in the small droplets on the pond. Or we can try catching life by it’s tail feathers. Either one is a viable option.