The Time Paradox

Time moves forward while we’re changing direction.

nazilah achmad
Journal Kita
Published in
3 min readJun 9, 2024

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Photo by Pawel Czerwinski on Unsplash

I’ve lived and passed several chapters of my life with different phase in it. I left an imprint for every phase that I’ve ever lived, so it will remind me that I was there before. I know there will be a lot more phase to come, but my heart becomes heavy every time I think about it.

Every phase has its own meaning to me. There’s a phase where I want to go back once more, but there’s also a phase where I’d rather not have the chance to experience it since the first place. When the seasons change, a new phase has come, I lost a piece of myself where it chose to stay there.

At first, I don’t really mind it cause it will be a lot easier for me to reminisce certain phase. For a while, I kind of enjoyed it. As the time passed by, I started to doubt it.

I started to think that it’s not a good idea to leave a piece of myself somewhere I’m supposedly not belong to anymore. It feels like my body is present, while my mind and soul are circling around the edge of my past. I’m mentally nowhere to be present.

It leads me to several questions emerged in my head. Is this how time works? Is it normal to cross between time and space? Will it be okay for me to be mentally in the past, whilst my body physically in the present? These questions left me hanged in place.

This whole thing become a paradox. When a lot of people think that we’re moving forward — linear as how time went by in the timeline, meanwhile I think that we’re moving backward — contradicted to the rail of time in the timeline. By having that idea, can I call it something such as a paradox?

Absurd as it sounds, but it appears somewhat true to me. To make it all make sense in my head — at least for now, I assumed that time is a paradox. The clock on the walls ticked forwardly while the people in it moved backwardly.

As the clock ticked to the next seconds, minutes, even hours, we’re living in two realms — past and present.

As time went by, we’re losing ourselves piece by piece.

Prior to those questions lingered in my head, all I can get is a bunch of possibility for the answer. The reason why I moved backwardly is perhaps there’s a thing or two that I left undone in the past. Perhaps, I made a mistake and it haunted me to the present. Perhaps, I left a huge piece of myself somewhere in the past.

I still have a lot of perhaps, if you ask. These days, I feel the need to stop going back in time cause I should know where I belong to. I’ll start in a place where I’ll be a whole, where I feel complete.

“Time flies over us, but leaves its shadow behind.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne.

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nazilah achmad
Journal Kita

the labyrinth of the world intrigued her to get lost in it, so she wrote to elaborate the bizarre things she discovered.