On Time and Its Passing

There are few things more peculiar than the human relationship to time. We live in it, move through it, and yet, somehow, we never quite believe in it. Intellectually, we know that all things change, that nothing stays as it is—but when we love someone, when we hold them, when we laugh with them, we secretly expect that moment to last forever. Or at least, we wish it would.

For the past month, I have lived in a kind of suspended reality, one defined by the rhythm of a baby’s world: the absurd joy of her laughter, the impossibly small weight of her in my arms, the way she looks at me as though I am an absolute fact, as though my presence is a given, not a variable. I have played with her, soothed her, watched her tiny hands discover the edges of the world. And now, she is gone. Not in the way that demands mourning, but in the quieter, more insidious way that demands acceptance. She has moved abroad, and I am left with the knowledge that she will never be this little again.

It is a strange thing to grieve something that still exists. She is still here, just farther away. She is still growing, just beyond my reach. But the version of her that I have known—the baby who fit so neatly into the crook of my arm, who babbled nonsense as though it were the most urgent truth—she is gone. And every day, she is disappearing further into time.

I know, rationally, that this is how it must be. That the gift of life is inseparable from the condition of change. But the mind rebels against this truth. It wants to press pause, to hold onto the feeling of her small hand wrapped around my finger. But no amount of wanting will stop the forward march of days.

I tell myself that I will see her again, that she will grow into a person with thoughts and opinions, that she will remember me. But what I really want is to go back, just for a moment, to last week, last night—to when she was still here, still small, still mine in the way that only babies can be.

And so, I sit here, confronting the strangest paradox of all: that love is both the most joyful and the most painful experience we are capable of. That the more deeply we love, the more acutely we feel time’s passage. And that, despite this, we would not choose otherwise.