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I was five last week, I turn twenty-five in a month.

Sometimes it seems like I was born just yesterday. Where does the time go, people ask? I chuckle, I don’t know, it doesn’t matter as long as it takes me with it, as long as I am young. But cracks appear, they always do, as I’m left standing on the side of the road, unsure where to go.

I was sixteen last summer, I’ll be eighty tomorrow, and I don’t know where this invisible feeling of angst and anguish is leading me. Where does time fly to, when it disappears? That’s a great question. I’d be tempted to answer: nowhere. Like a train without rails, it stays at the station, trapped in a sluggish whirlwind of nothingness. Or maybe it just evaporates, leaving no trace behind? “It passes”, that’s what time does, dripping in tiny echoes on cold tiles of stone.

I was ten when I tried to hold back tears, my knees scraped and bleeding. I was running around too much, careless and oblivious to how gravity works. I barely recognise myself in the mirror nowadays, behind the years of change and eventful times. I can’t even touch time, feel it, let alone understand it. Sand flowing through my hands, an hourglass, a beach, too quickly, too slowly. Never adequate.

I used to be a child, and I’ll be thirty soon enough. I liked nostalgia, I bathed in it, let it suffocate me over and over again. But I’m never going back to where, to what I was exactly. The urgency, pride and fury of teenage years was hammered into a stronger but milder mould, and some days, I still miss the drama. The excitement. The bullshit. Do I regret it, though?

I was five last week, I’ll be twenty five tomorrow. I can’t get off of this ride that’s only getting quicker each second that passes. It’s a special kind of agony. And, even if it isn’t linear, it’s inevitable, and it’s terrifying. Like knowing you’re going to fall down and hurt yourself hard if you ride your bike down a steep hill, but you’ve already started pedalling. I can’t keep up or hold on, it’s like I’m stuck in this perpetual motion sickness; that’s where I feel time goes when I’m not looking. I might be a tad dramatic, even when it swells up in my stomach, as anxious bile surges to my lips.

I was twenty a few months ago, I’ll be forty in a few hours. The pressure never stops, pushing relentlessly me towards the end of a youth I can’t even complain about. Have I never felt young, like Hozier says, or was I just too busy trying to be an adult already?

So much to do, so much to stir up, so much to dread. One might lose sleep, or even their head, if everything was sprawled at their feet, bare, for all to see. It’s jarring, isn’t it?

I was five last week, I’ll be twenty five tomorrow, but it’s okay, really. I find solace in the cycles, the routines I rehash. I guess a few of life’s many nooks and crannies are worth it after all. Time repeats, over and over again, even if I don’t understand its revolutions. This merry-go-round goes over my head, dragging me around to anywhere it pleases.

“Meanwhile the world goes on”, says Mary Oliver, trudging along mercilessly; such is my plight, my rage, my right. I’m just a ripple on the surface of its abysmal waters, an echo in a stormy pass, a whisper in a crowd. But like the geese, like the early mornings and late nights, everything ends, and everything comes back.

I was five last week, and I still don’t know how to treat myself kindly. I have no empathy for that terrified child, trapped in a grown-up’s body. I struggle to let that kid be soft and weak and guiltless. I wanted to bash myself into shape, bend over backwards just to try and make some sense of it all, instead of learning to listen. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. I’ve realised the only thing I can change is how kind I am to myself and to others.

I’ll be twenty-five in a few days. I’ve already lived so many lives, I can’t fathom the eternity that’s ahead of me. It feels so desperately short, sometimes, sending me into spirals of shame over lost time. I’m scared that I’m making bad choices, taking wrong turns even when it sounds about right. Wouldn’t it be easier if I knew what was waiting for me, out there, in the future? Yet it always mellows in sleep at the end of the day. I calm my heart and order it to be still when it beats too hard in my ears.Perhaps I am on the wrong track, but at least it’s mine.