The Sound of Galloping

They never told me, or perhaps they did,
And I, being young, would not hear it.
That time would quicken so.
That it would cast off its early gentleness,
Its slow and patient gait, and break into a thunderous gallop.
A deafening gallop of silence and hooves that come without mercy.

In childhood, time is a friend of infinite patience.
It lays down entire summers at your feet,
And they are sun warm and endless,
Meadows of hours in which to wander,
To fall, to be scolded, to forgive, to laugh again
And still, somehow leave enough time to wonder and wander.

But by slow degrees,
And oh, how cruelly slow they are,
The days begin to shrink.
They tuck themselves in tighter,
Folding away their corners like old letters,
And before you’ve grown wise enough to name the feeling,
The summers are no longer long;
They are merely hot, and then over.

You turn once, and it is autumn.
You turn again, and autumn has returned
Before you could even have the chance to know it arrived last year.
You look up and your mother’s hands are not as you remembered them.
They are worn now, creased and delicate.
Your father loses names, trails off mid-sentence,
And you smile for him because you love him.

And you, you, not yet old, but no longer young,
Stand before the mirror and see a stranger made of memory.
The eyes are yours, but quieter.
And they do not hope like they once did.

Once, birthdays waited politely and were always a hundred years away.
They lingered at the edge of the year and announced themselves with fanfare.
Now they arrive early, uninvited, with no time to prepare,
And leave with the haste of someone who barely knows your name.

And so it is that you begin to feel it, the press, the narrowing.
Not panic exactly, but a sense that something is folding in around you.
You cannot touch it, but you feel it.
And here is the truth of it,
the truth no one dares say plainly but one we all know.
We are all running, quietly, desperately, trying to gather what minutes we can.
Trying to stitch together a life that might last just a little longer.

But time does not bargain.
It has no regard for our tenderness, no pity for our efforts.
It does not care how much or how little you’ve loved,
How much you’ve mended or broke,
Nor how much you still have left to say.
It neither hurries nor waits.
It does not scorn you, but it does not spare you either.

It simply carries on.
And the faster you run to keep pace with it,
to hold more, do more,
And to be more in the little time you think you have,
The quicker it goes.