Time and Youth

By: Martina Isaksen Duque

Look at yourself. In the mirror, the misted mirror in the bathroom. Look at yourself. What do you know? What can you say about time in your youth?

The youth in your face, your teenager expressions when you look at yourself, talk to yourself, and steel the resolve in your heart. There is very little of that world-weariness that characterizes so many of the faces of those who have long left the time of their childhood behind.

But your eyes don’t look naive, right? The guarded look in there. Do you know what I’m talking about? There is a reserve in the pools of emotion that you let through. You know stuff. You know of injustice and pain, though you’re young. Very young by all accounts. Do you feel young? Time has gone by in waves, crashing and ebbing gently and making it impossible to tell how fast it goes by. It stretches infinitely and simultaneously disappears without a trace.

It’s different to how it felt when you were a kid. A little kid who measured the passing of the years by big landmarks that felt uniquely important. Birthdays, Christmas, holidays. They showed the passage of time. And in the endless wait between one moment and the next, the fog of waiting, waiting, waiting, filled with excitement and anticipation for all the happiness: the incessant laughter that bounces around and comes back with each friend that shares your time with you, the sunlight that brightens the memories like they were captured in watercolor, the gifts that seem to cement the importance of those moments.

Now, time moves all too fast and too slow at the same time. Time can’t be occupied with idle thought and gentle reverie. Time cannot be wasted on the interesting patterns that make up the wooden table, or the shapes of the clouds, or the magical creatures that inhabit all the corners of the world. There is no time to waste- though of course, we do not know if time is ever really wasted. When you reminisce about the past, when you delve into your memories, the sharpest ones are the ones when the time was “wasted.” Can you really ever waste time?

And yet you hurry, you race against the clock. The clock that seems to know you too well, so that it only goes faster when you need it to slow down, and still goes too fast when you need time to pass. It’s a blur of color and sound: a rollercoaster you can’t get off of. So you grab onto the handlebar and try not to fall.

I’ll ask again. What do you know of a time in your youth? Innocence and bliss is projected onto your face like a movie theatre. You look at the well-weathered faces around you, how

every line tells the world of experiences lived and survived. They know so much, they faced so much. Their time has stretched decades and begun to blur at the edges. Hazy patches flow through the images that make up their story.

And yet through your innocence, past the deceptive bliss of ignorance in your eyes, deep inside your soul, the seed of time has scared you. It has drawn its claws through your heart to show your story. Pain and happiness intermingle in the lines that your face still doesn’t have but which are being forged every day, the telltale signs of time. What do you know of time? Much of what those who have lived though it have forgotten. What does your youth leave behind? The opening line of a book, the starting point that sets the course of history forward. And the link between the memories of those whose faces are lined with experience and those whose eyes reflect only the stars. Go forth into the world, knowledgeable of time, of change, of lines in a book that are only halfway through the story: unfinished, but with plenty of story to tell.