As the world goes from unbearable heat to crisp fall mornings, as we hit a third wave and become more and more intolerant of closeness to others, and as the clocks turn backwards, leaving us with an extra hour behind closed doors, we are all closer to yesterday than ever. Why? It's all about the tangibility of what was, and what will never be again.

As quarantine progresses, I sometimes get a twing of panic. How is this my new reality? But maybe quarantine, and the seasons, and clocks, have nothing to do with it. Perhaps our perception of time is infallible, and we are never going to pinpoint that exact moment we changed forever.

We do change. Each moment brings us closer to our new personhood. How can I explain my actions ten years ago? I was a different person. I wake up in bed every morning and reflect on the time that has passed me by, who I was, how I've changed. Did it happen in seconds, overnight, or decade by decade? Maybe this is what everyone thinks about, or maybe it's so close to our reality, so obviously related to our deaths, that we don't think about it at all. I think about my decisions and feel deeply horrified. I think the perception of time brings us intimately close to who we have been; we are never going to be the same person we were yesterday. Or ten years ago. This is both depressing and deeply liberating.

But how can we know when that clock ticked to that certain second, and we changed forever? I'm obsessed now, especially during this time when death is in the air we breathe, with figuring out how many people I have ever been, in just three decades. How many breaths until I obliviously change, forever. Shouldn't this be something obvious, or is the meaning behind being a person is that we live so close to the present moment?

I'm going to die one day, and what will I have left behind? If each second on the clock is another breath I take, how many breaths until the next person I become?

I can still smell the coffee grounds perculating at my college cafe. I want this back so, so desperately. When was the last time I walked in and ordered coffee, and how could I have known it would be the last time I'd ever do that again? When I exited the cafe, how was I feeling? I was probably agonizing about something out of my control, something that doesn't matter anymore. So time goes. So flies away regret, so many seconds ticking towards something different and uncontrollable.

I believe we can't change knowingly, and time is the reason behind that. It is lucid and buried, as much a part of our conscious as breathing.

This is my latest obsession. We can turn clocks backwards but we'll never know when we woke up and changed, or if we ever did, and when we'll die, how our presence ever affected time and the space we take.

thousands and thousands of ghosts

billowing around town

breathing the fear in and out

lost their stories

to a number

exponential, as we know

obsoleted by another

sounding shocking for a moment

soon forgotten, soon replaced

letting my body in isolation

walk through the rows

of locked up homes

leftovers of their souls

stuck to pavement of

empty roads.

my friend has the big sad.

she deflects and jokes and says it’s okay,

but she stares at the knives in her kitchen drawer and thinks, ‘i die today.’

my friend has the big sad.

her mom is sick, and it’s gotten bad.

my friend stays alive for her mom and her dad, but she’s tired of holding on.

so i try to text her every day,

do what i can.

the big sad doesn’t really go away, even knowing someone cares,

but maybe it’ll shrink.

She gripped the gun,

and shot.

(okay I'm sorry gotta fill the word limit, I feel that the most gripping sentences are short and sweet, but it makes you want to keep reading, to know what happens next. (or maybe force the reader to keep reading to know what happened)

Laura Summers had no idea that the day she got jilted at the altar was also the day she met the man of her dreams.

(At first glance, you'd think this would be found in a romance novel, but is it though? In fact, the book is being published as paranormal horror...)

"I don't know really.. It feels like it is but yet when we look at it, it does feel like it isn't. In the long run, will it be worth it? That's the one question we all have at some moments in our lives but other times it's better to just dive right in instead of focusing on that because we might end up not knowing anything, it's such a long process to think about it all so I prefer you ask yourself why we want to do that. At least that's much easier and better than to think so much about the other question that you overthink yourself over such a thing but yet again, we'll be forced to ask ourselves the same question another time in our lives so there's no point in dodging the question."