The Infinite Tense of Us

Age is a subtle thing.

Not because it goes unnoticed, necessarily, but because most of the time it happens without asking to be witnessed. There is no ceremony when one version of you becomes another. No clean division between the person you were and the person you are becoming. You simply wake up one morning and realize that something you used to call later has become your life.

I think that is what unsettles me most about time: how little it needs from us.

Years can rearrange an entire person while she is busy making coffee, answering messages, forgetting to buy groceries. A face changes by fractions. A friendship becomes a memory through a series of completely ordinary days. Your parents become older while still sounding exactly like themselves on the phone. A place you once knew by instinct becomes somewhere you need directions to reach.

Nothing announces itself, then suddenly you notice.

Maybe that is the strangest thing about aging: it feels almost passive even though it is one of the most relentless things happening to us. Time keeps making versions of us obsolete while somehow preserving them inside us, and the future is already becoming intimate with us before we even know its name.

I used to think of time as something passing in front of me, as though I were standing still beside a road watching it disappear into the distance. There was the past behind me, the future somewhere ahead, and this thin strip beneath my feet that I was apparently supposed to call the present.

I don't think I believe that anymore.

Time seems less orderly than that. It folds over itself. Things return without actually returning. A smell can collapse fifteen years into half a second. You can hear someone laugh and, for reasons you cannot explain, remember a kitchen that no longer exists. You can become afraid in exactly the way you were afraid at seven years old while standing inside a body that has survived decades beyond her.

The past does not stay where we put it.

Neither, strangely, does the future.

There are things that have not happened to me yet that are already shaping the person I am becoming capable of being. People I have never met will change my language. Rooms I have never entered will eventually contain versions of me I cannot imagine from here. There are losses I do not know to fear yet. There are ordinary Tuesdays that will become precious only after they are gone.

That thought used to make me anxious.

Maybe sometimes it still does.

There is something deeply uncomfortable about knowing that your life contains events already moving toward you while remaining completely inaccessible to you. Somewhere in the architecture of what comes next are conversations that will divide your life into before and after. There are names that mean nothing to you now that may one day become impossible to hear casually. There are places currently existing without you that will eventually become threaded through your memory so tightly that you will struggle to remember yourself before them.

And none of them need your anticipation in order to arrive.

Life does not wait for us to understand it before it changes us.

I find that both terrifying and strangely comforting.

The world is full of things occurring completely outside the scale of one human life. Shorelines changing by inches. Buildings being raised where someone once swore there was nothing but field. Trees growing around fences. Languages shifting word by word. People being born who will inherit arguments we have not finished and consequences we will never see.

There is something almost humiliating about how little the world depends on any one of us.

And maybe something freeing about it too.

We spend so much of our lives behaving as though existence is an assignment we might complete incorrectly. As though if we choose the wrong city, love the wrong person, waste the wrong year, fail to become impressive enough by some invisible deadline, we will somehow fall out of step with life itself.

But life is not a train we miss.

It keeps happening around our indecision.

The morning arrives during grief. Your body ages while you are busy hating it. Flowers grow beside hospitals. Someone is falling in love while someone else is packing a dead loved one's clothes into boxes. People laugh at funerals and cry at birthdays. The world refuses almost every clean category we try to impose upon it.

It continues.

Simply because continuation is what living things do.

Maybe that is why getting older feels so strange. You begin accumulating evidence that time is real without ever becoming better at feeling it move.

I can remember versions of myself with such clarity that it seems impossible they are gone. I know what she wanted. I know what embarrassed her. I know the future she assumed she was walking toward. Sometimes I feel protective of her. Sometimes irritated. Sometimes I want to reach backward and tell her that half the things keeping her awake will become completely irrelevant.

But there are also things she knew that I have forgotten.

Certain kinds of courage. Certain forms of certainty. Ways of wanting without immediately interrogating the want.

So perhaps aging is not simply becoming wiser, or better, or more yourself. I distrust that kind of neat progression. Sometimes we gain things. Sometimes we abandon them. Sometimes we spend years recovering something we once possessed without effort.

We are not a straight line.

We are an accumulation of it all.

Every version remains somewhere in the structure.

The child who misunderstood the room. The teenager who thought everything mattered forever. The person who stayed too long. The person who left too quickly. The person you are embarrassed to have been. The person you miss being. They do not disappear simply because you can no longer inhabit them.

They become part of the strange internal crowd that answers when someone calls your name.

And still, there are more of you coming.

That might be the part I find most difficult to comprehend.

There are future versions of me who will remember this exact period imperfectly. They will reduce entire months into a sentence. They will forget what currently feels unbearable. They may miss things I am presently desperate to escape. They will know endings I am still trying to predict.

I wonder what they would think of me.

Not in the self-help sense. I do not particularly want advice from some imaginary, perfected future self standing at the end of the road with all the answers.

I don't think she exists.

But I like thinking that somewhere inside the shape of my life is a woman who has already survived things I currently cannot picture surviving simply because, one day, they will become things that happened.

Past tense is a strange mercy.

So much of what consumes us eventually becomes grammar.

I was.

I lived there.

I loved them.

I didn't know.

That was before.

And still, I do not think this makes the present small.

I think it makes it almost unbearably particular.

This cup. This room. This body at this age. The people whose voices I can still hear without having to remember them. The problems that are real because they are happening now. The version of the world that exists only briefly before another replaces it.

None of it stays.

But staying was never the condition for being real.

Perhaps that is the mistake.

We treat impermanence as evidence that something has been taken from us when impermanence was part of the agreement from the beginning. Every beautiful thing arrives already carrying the possibility of its ending. Every beginning contains a future in which somebody says, I remember when.

Even us.

Especially us.

And maybe there is no grand lesson in that. Maybe I don't want there to be one.

I am tired of turning existence into a moral.

I don't think time is trying to teach us anything. I don't think the universe is arranging itself into metaphors for our benefit. The tide is not a message. The moon does not care whether I become who I intended to become. The years are not waiting to see if I use them correctly.

There is something almost sacred in their indifference.

Because if the world is not asking me to conquer it, justify my place in it, or extract some perfect meaning from every passing year, then perhaps I am allowed simply to be here for a while.

To witness it.

To be changed by things before I understand what they changed.

To enter rooms without knowing which ones I will remember forever.

To love people without knowing how long their names will remain part of my vocabulary.

To become older without treating every previous version of myself as something I failed to remain.

The world keeps unfolding.

So do I.

Not toward some final, polished self waiting patiently at the end of all this, but into stranger and more complicated forms—some chosen, some accidental, some shaped by people and places I have not encountered yet.

There is something waiting ahead that will one day feel familiar.

There always has been.

Maybe that is what a life is: not a road toward something, but a constant becoming intimate with what was once unimaginable.

And one day, without noticing exactly when it happened, you look around at the future you once could not see.

It has your books on the shelves.

Your clothes over the chair.

Your grief inside its walls.

Your coffee going cold somewhere nearby.

It knows all your habits.

It answers to your name.

And somehow, impossibly, you are already there.