Time-The Old Bald Cheater

Anne thought she would never come to this, but on the day she turned twenty, a single realization struck her: time flies - no, a better phrase would be time is an old bald cheater. When she first came across it in Stephen King's Hearts in Atlantis, the phrase reminded her of Shakespeare's Life's Brief Candle - the remorse and fury of a dying man against every waking moments of his life. Yet, there was also something peculiar and amusing about it; something that made the phrase fell oddly in place for her today.
        She wasn't thinking about dying, but about how the past two decades had shaped her future ones and made her into someone she wasn't. She thought about all the first tastes she had of the world: her first memories was lying down in the back seat of the Toyota with a red Mickey Mouse pillow on her face and sticking her legs against the windscreen; her first favourite word was power failure because it sounded like pow and flower and she shouted it everytime the house went dark; her first dream was to own a white house in Courtyard with a swimming pool and swirling mists and the sweet scent of fresh grass. Now, she couldn't even imagine how sweet tasted to her, not in the same way.
        It was a sad fact that the more we owned of the world, the more we owed. One of them: the child within ourselves. But then, that was always the irony of life, wasn't it? We spent a lifetime searching for all sorts of achievements, - the perfect schools, the perfect grades, the perfect testimonials, the perfect resumes, the perfect job, the perfect self everyone expected you to be - only realising much later, when almost a third quarter of our life was gone, that all we have to do was look down. Yes, time was indeed an old bald cheater, and we the yesterday's fools who strut and fret our hours to the days of dusty deaths. 

The Green Mile-A Review

We each owe a death,

There are no exceptions.

But Oh Lord,

Sometimes the green mile seems so long.

These were the words spoken by a man who once witnessed the death of someone who shouldn't die-a man who now desires to die, but couldn't.
        "It was my punishment," he sighed. Those very words sent a deep pang of sorrow into Anne's heart. She felt awfully sorry that while blood was shed and bones were piled upon men's insatiable search for immortality, there were some who reached the point where they had nothing more to be gained from living.
        Speaking about death, the ubiquitous question would be:"What would we do in the face of death?". But had we ever thought of this:"What would we do if we witnessed death?". This movie cast death in a whole new light-death in the eyes of the prisoners, the executioners and the witnesses of the execution. While she found it agonizing for the prisoners to count their remaining days when death was literally just next door, Anne simply couldn't bear the thought of watching death at such a close distance-much less executing it on someone else, even if they deserved it.
        That was why she cried so hard during the execution of John Coffey. She couldn't fathom the state of mind of people who had so little left in this world that they wished for nothing but to leave. It wasn't that her strong urge of survival guided her into subconsciously projecting it onto those who had lost theirs, but the undeniable fact that life was once and forever. No matter what they believed death allegedly had to offer-an escapade from mortal sufferings or an afterlife as depicted in religious metaphors-they must also believe that everyone lived for a special reason, especially someone with a gift like John.
        In Anne's eyes, a true hero didn't need superpowers, but the courage to save the world from all its sufferings. With that belief in mind, it didn't really matter how long the green mile stretched, because every minute of our journey had been worthwhile.
        And that, Anne felt, was the true essence of immortality which everyone had been seeking all along.