Time, The Trickster: Five Years in a Blink
Time is wild. It bends, stretches, compresses, and warps in ways that make no logical sense. Five years in Austin have disappeared in what feels like a blink, yet somehow, the move from Astoria to Austin in February 2020 still feels like it just happened. It’s as if my body is here, but some part of me is still walking those familiar streets, weaving through the hum of the city, past bodegas and brownstones, caught in the echo of a place that never fully lets go.
And then, just like that, another February arrived. This time, February 2024, not with a cross-country leap, but with a milestone—closing on a new house and studio. A full circle moment. But how could five years have evaporated like mist, while other moments—waiting in a doctor’s office, a flight delay, the last minutes of an unbearable meeting—feel like they stretch into eternity? The contradiction of time is maddening, mesmerizing.
The Illusion of Time
Some argue that time doesn’t actually exist. That it’s a construct we’ve wrapped ourselves in, like a blanket woven from sunrises and deadlines. Physicists have made cases that past, present, and future all exist simultaneously, that time isn’t linear, but something more fluid—something our minds simply perceive as a straight line because that’s the only way we can process it.
And yet, we live by the clock. We measure, we count, we celebrate anniversaries, we mourn the years that slip away too fast. Time is both real and unreal, both rigid and elastic.
The Fast and the Slow
If time were absolute, then five years should always feel like five years. But the human mind doesn’t work that way. Time moves at the speed of experience. When we’re immersed in something new, when our senses are overloaded, when we’re present, time expands. It becomes vast. That’s why childhood summers felt endless, why a single month in a new city can feel like an entire era.
But routine compresses time. Days blur. Wake, work, eat, repeat. The rhythm of familiarity tricks us into believing that time is slipping through our fingers. Maybe that’s why Austin still feels new—because in between, the world paused. Just weeks after moving, the pandemic rewrote everything. Time became even stranger, a limbo between what was and what would be. And now, stepping into this next chapter, it feels like I’ve finally hit play again.
A Moment to Breathe
I don’t know if time exists, not in the way we think it does. But I do know that it doesn’t wait for anyone. And if the last five years have taught me anything, it’s that being present—truly here, truly awake in the moment—is the only way to slow it down. Not by trying to hold on, but by allowing each moment to be fully lived.
So here’s to five years that passed in a blink. Here’s to the next five, and whatever strange, beautiful, impossible way they unfold.
Until next time, Your fellow human just being.
Six Missing
