Where'd all the time go?
I genuinely feel like i am frozen in time. Somewhere between 2015 and 2019, that's where my life stopped. When i will thaw, I do not know. Some days it feels as though i am encased in a translucent block, watching the world move outside my edges. Not completely detached—just close enough to observe. People age into themselves. Seasons arrive on schedule. Conversations move forward, plans get made, years announce themselves loudly. And yet, I remain here, still and suspended, as though time has learned how to move around me without ever fully touching me. I wonder if everyone feels this way sometimes, or if it is just me, cursed with the clarity of memory and the heaviness of longing.
Earlier this year, I came across a note someone posted that said 2016 was ten years ago????
I stared at it longer than I should have.
I think that was the moment I felt my chest tighten.
Since the start of the new year, I’ve been seeing variations of this everywhere. People talking about how we are much closer to 2030 than we are to 2020. About how time is accelerating. About how we've crossed some invisible threshold and didn't even notice. Coupled with that is this rising insistence that 2026 is the new 2016—that we can resurrect the feeling if we just bring back the clothes, the playlists, the slang. And sure, for what it’s worth, it feels good to romanticize. It feels good to pretend that nostalgia can be summoned on command. But can we just—pause?
Because no one tells you how disorienting it is to realize that the years you keep returning to are no longer recent. That they are no longer adjacent to you. That they have quietly crossed into the territory of long ago while you were busy surviving the present.
Remembrance of things past is not necessarily the remembrance of things as they were”-Marcel Proust
This sentence follows me around like a shadow. Because what I hold is not the moment itself—it is a memory altered by distance, softened by desire, shaped by the person I am now. I long for a past that exists mostly in feeling, not fact. A past that may never have been as gentle or as whole as I remember it.
I wonder sometimes if this is the curse of memory. That it gifts us the sweetness of the past but never the fullness of the present. I had been decluttering a few old school books in December dating as far back as 2009. I was four then, I still used pencils. The world as it was to me was perfect to me in my vulnerability. I did not yet understand loss as something permanent. I did not yet know how time could take without asking.
As I flipped through one of the books, i noticed something strange. At first, I thought I had never written anything in it. The pages looked bare. I told myself it must be my eyes—I wasn’t wearing my glasses. So I held it up to the light.
And no. It wasn’t my fault.
What once felt full of lead—dark, deliberate, certain—had faded into something almost illegible. The pencil marks were still there, technically, but time had softened them. The weight of continuity had done what it always does. It had worn them down quietly.
“Invisible threads are the strongest ties.”-Friedrich Nietzsche
Maybe that’s all nostalgia is: invisible threads tying who we were to who we are now. Threads so thin we don’t notice them until they pull tight. Until we feel ourselves being drawn backward, even as we continue moving forward.
As I ran my fingers over those blurred pencil lines, that was the moment I could truly feel the nostalgia seeping in. Yes i am pushing 21, but in that moment, four didn’t feel far away. Seventeen and eighteen didn’t feel like separate lifetimes. They felt adjacent. Immediate. Alive beneath my skin. But I know they are all gone. Yet time and again, they are everywhere, like ghosts hovering just beyond my vision.
“Nostalgia is a seductive liar” -George .W. Ball
And he is right. Because I do not seem to remember the nights of discomfort, boredom and anxiety as much as i remember its warmth, thrill and the beauty of intimacy. Memory edits like a meticulous editor, pruning what does not fit the story i want to tell myself. And then i ask: Is the past ever real? Or is it only a lens, shaped by desire and longing that makes me ache for something that never truly existed?
Lately, I’ve been thinking about the word ‘frozen’. About how it sounds both violent and gentle. About what it implies. Time halted. Motion suspended. Preservation. To be frozen is to be held in place, yes—but it is also to be protected from decay. There is something tender about being frozen in time. It allows me to look at who I was without contempt. To meet past selves with compassion instead of urgency. To acknowledge that I did the best I could with what I knew.
It is a strange solace, a bittersweet clarity: I am both lost and found in memory, imprisoned and liberated by it, suspended and alive. I write these words knowing they will age, knowing that future eyes—perhaps my own—will look back on them and see traces of a self I no longer am. And yet, in writing, there is a semblance of permanence, a fragile record that the frozen self existed, that it felt, that it waited.
Time doesn't care. Only i care.
And maybe that's the lesson-nostalgia is not inherently harmful. It is not a punishment but rather a companion. It reminds me that I have lived, that I have felt, that the moments I treasure are proof that I have been present, even if only briefly. It asks me to honor those moments, to carry them forward not as chains, but as talismans.
It is January 2026, and the photograph i take right now, in this moment will merely be an antiquity in the next ten years. It's edges may curl. It's colors may fade, but it will carry the same essence-the tender weight of being alive in a fleeting irretrievable moment. And I think that perhaps that is the only mortality we are offered: not in the past we remember, nor the future we imagine, but in the fragile and inconsistently fleeting now.
If this resonated with you or felt familiar in a way you can’t quite explain, you might also like: We do not know every stranger
I love thisss
That Marcel Proust quote is my favourite quote of all time. Lovely post