What’s strange about time is not just that it passes. It’s that emotionally, it doesn’t move in a straight line. Some seasons of life feel buried under decades, while others feel close enough to touch. I can remember being twenty-two more clearly than I can remember what I did three Tuesdays ago.
Lately, with Milo in high school, we’ve been spending more time around kids standing right on the edge of adulthood. And now it’s graduation season. Watching them has brought me right back to that time in my own life, a season I remember so vividly. Everyone telling us, “It goes by so fast,” and us smiling politely because when you’re eighteen, time feels endless. Life feels like something that hasn’t really started yet.
There are parts of my life I don’t just remember, I can still feel them.
I can still feel that last week of high school when the weather finally turns warm. Everyone outside all the time. Flirting with people you barely know. Driving around with nowhere to be. That strange mix of freedom and sadness because you know something is ending while something else is just starting, even if you can’t fully understand what yet.
Then college. Thursday nights out because Fridays and Saturdays never felt long enough. Football games on wobbly bleachers. Cheap beer. Loud apartments. The beginning of realizing who you are, while also having absolutely no idea who you are.
Those years feel impossibly vivid to me.
And then your twenties arrive, and you’re still resisting the idea of becoming an actual adult. Drinking a bottle of wine on a Monday while watching The Bachelor. Traveling the world with a combination of fear, naivete, and so much confidence, all at once. Working ridiculous hours because you can. The kind of grind only people without children can sustain. Feeling exhausted but invincible at the same time.
Then suddenly there are babies.
And no one can really explain what that phase feels like until you’re in it. The sleeplessness that makes you think you may genuinely never sleep again. The endless cycle of tiny illnesses passed from one little body to another until your entire house is coughing. The overwhelming monotony of survival.
But also the love.
The kind of love that rearranges your understanding of yourself. The kind you didn’t know your body or heart were capable of holding.
And now, as my life and family continue to grow, I know we’re creating those vivid memories all over again. Driving the kids from one activity to another. Sitting in the stands cheering them on. Building traditions. Building a company. Building a life I once could never have imagined for myself.
But somehow, this chapter feels blurrier to me than those earlier years.
Maybe that’s because when you’re young, everything feels monumental. Every friendship, every heartbreak, every late night, every tiny decision feels like it’s shaping who you are becoming. And now, life moves faster. Fuller. The days are packed so tightly that sometimes it’s hard to notice the memories while you’re inside them.
But I know they’re being made.
I know one day I’ll look back on this season with the same ache and clarity I feel toward those younger years now.
I know there’s more ahead too. More phases I haven’t reached yet. More versions of life that will someday feel just as vivid and impossibly distant all at once. And now we’re in the middle of the memories we’ll one day ache for.
.HEIC)
.HEIC)
