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.
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