Poetic Paragraphs

Time

Time flows by in a stream, ever-moving, carrying away the debris of past lives in its waters. One by one, people wade their way up the stream, legs heavy with exhaustion.

And the young are carried on their parents' backs, baby fat clinging to their bones, screams falling from their open mouths. They are young and innocent, and the world hasn't set its teeth into them. They have yet to feel the cold waters of life, of struggle, of growing up and watering down.

The children are next, up to their chests in water, running against a current that's almost too strong. The sickly ones are blown away, mowed down by the stream. The rest watch, wide-eyed, running forward in life as others fall.

But they tuck the images away, hide it in a crevice of their mind, and find the will to laugh, smile, unwrinkled faces framed by vibrantly-colored hair. They are happy, and the world is full of potential, sunrises and sunsets sprawling into an endless horizon. They have the energy to spare, and laughter comes easy in an unburdened chest.

Children grow up so fast, and soon they're no longer the laughing little ones that smiled so freely. The teenagers charge up the stream, hands full of textbooks weighing them down.

They are awash with work, graphite-smudged fingers clambering through pages. Living their lives within the confines of college-ruled paper, they fight their way through college-ruled lives, building themselves into people that universities will accept.

And these teenagers are too old to be children, too young to be grown, and too tired to figure it all out. They can only keep sprinting against the flow of water, trying to stay alive. In their minds, the tucked-away idea of death has begun to sprout, watered by the bodies that float their way, those who fell before them.

Slipping into their heads, death rises from the crevice in which it had been hidden, soft and silent. It's there, unnoticed, casting silent shade over thoughts, and sometimes shade turns to darkness and overcast nights filled with clouds, teenagers standing in brightly lit bathrooms with razors over their bared wrists. Sometimes little thoughts sprout into big ones, and big ideas sit patiently on their host's shoulders until they fall into the water and don't get up.

But the stream keeps flowing because time waits for no one, and no one is immune to time.

No children, with their vibrant smiles, or teenagers, with their lives bound by college and their college-bound lives. And not adults, never adults.

Because it seems like the stream gets faster for them, sloshing on by as they trail the water with their fingertips. It all seems too quick, too strange, and they are pretending to be older than they feel and failing to act as old as they are. Graphite-stained fingers morph into ink-stained hands, signing checks, doing taxes, trying to handle the responsibility that sits on their backs.

They aren't charging up the stream anymore. The end is there, looming in the watery horizon, and they understand they'll reach it one way or another. It isn't their choice. And those who decide to make it their own choice will only be another floating body, slipping gently down the stream.

Walking, they get through it day by day, night by night, watching the world turn around them. Caffeinated nights blur into coffee-flavored mornings, and eventually the mundanity of it all is enough to draw the madness up from the back of the brain.

There is no more alcohol-infused dancing on tables, wild nights with head thrown back, free of beer-drowned worries. No, early adulthood is too mature for that, or at least that's what they tell themselves. Instead, some grow tired of the stream, of the monotony, and little baggies of white powder and carefully rolled joints can make things easier.

And slowly, softly, those people start losing control, and the water seems shiny and pretty and right. Because sometimes they're in too deep to pull their head from under the water, and the riverbed seems more comfortable than any mattress.

But some continue forward, dealing with life, dealing with the water and the movement and the mundanity, and they find love. The stream is cold, but a partner makes it warmer, and sometimes that's enough to keep going.

And then a child is strapped to their backs. But everyone staggers on, because falling into the water at this point would mean drowning the child, leaving it to float the stream, waiting for someone to pick him back up.

The vibrant hair of childhood has faded into white strands, dusty, but it doesn't matter anymore. Fingers and skin, long left in the water of life, have pruned, wrinkled, but the stream moves on without a worry because time will not stop for beauty.

And after a while, after an eternity of moments have passed, legs give out and it's time to go under. Gracefully, peacefully, people who have made it to that horizon they saw long ago are dragged under, or they fall. It's okay. They made it far, they walked the stream and now it is time for them to become another floating body, carried by the water instead of struggling against it.

Children see their floating bodies, eyes wide, and tuck that idea into a crevice in their minds as they continue on.

After all, time stops for nobody, and people grow up so fast.

And after a while, the water washes away memories of those lost to make space for the new.