The Unbearable Weight Of Time

Time doesn’t move forward. That’s the lie. It loops. It folds in on itself like dirty laundry. It drips, then floods, then vanishes. You lose whole years to it, then get stuck in moments you thought were long gone. You blink and you’re 44, sitting in a quiet room, wondering how the hell you got here. Wondering if you were ever really here to begin with.

It’s not the aging that breaks you. It’s the weight. The gravity of memory. The accumulation of everything you didn’t say, everything you let slide, every version of yourself that you abandoned along the way. Time is not a healer. It’s a hoarder. It keeps everything. The missed chances. The wrong turns. The faces of people who left, died, changed, or simply stopped showing up. It keeps them all, perfectly preserved in some cruel mental trophy case, waiting to be examined when you least expect it.

You find yourself mourning people who are still alive. You think about the friends you used to laugh with until sunrise, now reduced to pixelated avatars with birthday notifications. You think about lovers who felt eternal for three weeks in the summer of 2004. You think about the version of yourself who still believed in possibility, who still ran toward things instead of away from them. He’s dead now. Or worse—he still exists somewhere in you, screaming behind glass.

The unbearable part of time isn’t that it passes. It’s that it doesn’t stop. Not for joy. Not for pain. Not even for grief. You can have the worst day of your life and time will just keep going. The clock doesn’t flinch. It keeps ticking while you unravel. It keeps moving while you bury the past in your body like shrapnel.

And then there are the days where it drags. Endless stretches of nothing. The same sunrise. The same to-do list. The same filtered faces, curated meals, and hollow conversations. It becomes harder and harder to tell the difference between surviving and existing. You start to feel like you’re living on borrowed time, except no one’s coming to collect. They just let you rot in it. Quietly. Elegantly. Decay in real time, politely smiling through it.

Sometimes I look at old photos and feel physically sick. Not because I looked better or younger or more alive—but because I remember what I thought back then. I remember thinking this is forever. I remember thinking I’ll never lose this. And now I’m older, leaner, quieter, and haunted by how confidently wrong I was.

Everyone tells you to “enjoy the moment.” As if that’s something you can hold. But moments slip through your hands before you know they mattered. And the good ones—the ones with laughter and sunlight and people you loved—they come with a shadow. Because even while they’re happening, you know they’re dying. Every perfect second is already becoming a ghost.

I think that’s why I walked 20 miles a day. Why I drank. Why I tried to outpace the ache. I wanted to beat time. To make the day matter before it could slip away. But you can’t outrun it. You just become part of it. Another man in line, walking toward the end like everyone else, pretending you’ve made peace with it.

Time doesn’t give back. It doesn’t negotiate. It doesn’t care what you’ve learned. The only reward for survival is more of it—more time to remember, more time to regret, more time to feel the weight.

And no one prepares you for how heavy it gets.

You just carry it.

Until you don’t.