Time is not a clock. It’s a creature. A magician dressed in patience.
It moves without footsteps, breathes without lungs, and hums lullabies that sound suspiciously like your mother’s voice from another decade. You don’t see it coming; you only ever catch it leaving, trailing cigarette smoke and half-remembered laughter behind.
Some nights, you can feel it watching. The room goes still, your skin buzzes, and the seconds start dripping instead of ticking. You look around and nothing’s changed, but you have. The hands on the clock tremble like they’re tired too, like even time gets exhausted keeping track of all our reinventions.
Time doesn’t move in seconds. It moves in goodbyes.
You notice it in the most mundane betrayals. Your childhood jumper doesn’t fit. Your favourite shop has been replaced by a pharmacy. Your friend’s voice sounds older over the phone. You scroll through old photos, and suddenly your heart feels like an attic, full of dust, full of ghosts.
There’s that playlist you made when you were fine, the one that now feels like archaeology. There’s the birthday that used to feel exciting but now just feels like another checkpoint in a marathon you never signed up for.
Time, the quiet sorcerer, casts its spell in ways you can’t fight. Not loud. Not cruel. Just consistent. The kind of magic that changes you gently enough for you to deny it until one day you realise you’ve outgrown your own handwriting.
It paints wrinkles on faces, but also wisdom in eyes. It takes, yes, but it also trades.
You lose your baby teeth, gain your voice.
Lose your innocence, gain understanding.
Lose people, gain meaning.
Still, the cost feels unfair.
Because when you finally understand what a moment means, it’s already gone. When you start to appreciate a phase, it’s already ending.
Time is the most romantic villain you’ll ever meet. Cruel, but only because it keeps every promise.
And here you are, sitting in its aftermath, realising that everything beautiful you’ve ever known is temporary, and somehow, that’s what makes it beautiful.
Time casts a spell on us all. Not to destroy, but to transform.
And we, foolishly human, mistake transformation for loss.
The self: the mirror that ages.
At sixteen, I thought forever was a promise.
At eighteen, I learnt it’s a phase.
At almost twenty, I realised it’s a privilege.
Time doesn’t just change you. It chisels you. It carves out old fears, sands down sharp edges, and sometimes, breaks you only to remake you with softer hands.
You look back and hardly recognise the person you were. She dressed like rebellion and spoke like she knew everything. She had faith in people who’d barely earned it and dreams too big for her lungs. But she was brave in ways you aren’t anymore.
You want to thank her and apologise to her at the same time.
Healing hurts because it kills your past self, the one who survived long enough for you to outgrow her.
You scroll through old journal entries, and it’s like reading a stranger’s biography. “Who was this girl?”, you whisper. “And when did I stop being her?” But that’s the thing about time. It doesn’t ask permission to rewrite you. It just does.
Sometimes it’s kind, the gentle kind of growth that feels like sunrise. Other times it’s brutal, the kind that feels like being uprooted mid-bloom. But both are necessary.
You shed versions of yourself the way trees shed leaves. Each identity you’ve worn still exists somewhere, fossilised in the memory of those who knew you then.
And oh, the irony. We spend years trying to find ourselves, only to learn we were never meant to stay ourselves.
Time teaches you to stop treating change like betrayal. Because maybe growing up isn’t about becoming someone new; it’s about remembering who you were before the world told you otherwise.
Your younger self thought adulthood would feel complete. It doesn’t. It just feels quieter. Less fireworks, more flickers. You laugh less loudly but mean it more. You cry more often but understand why.
And through it all, you start forgiving yourself for being human. For not having it all figured out. For learning lessons the hard way, twice, sometimes thrice.
The mirror ages with you. And one day, you’ll look at it and realise that every wrinkle is a story, every scar a survival. You’ll trace your reflection and whisper, “You’ve made it through every version so far. You’ll make it through this one too.”
Because time isn’t here to ruin you. It’s here to reveal you.
The people: ghosts in the gallery.
Every life is a gallery, and every person you’ve ever loved is framed somewhere inside it. Some portraits are golden, glowing with laughter and inside jokes. Some are faded, edges curling from neglect. And some hang behind glass, untouchable, preserved in a kind of emotional museum that only opens after midnight.
You walk through it sometimes. Quietly. Barefoot. Careful not to disturb the dust.
There’s your best friend from school, the one who swore you’d stay inseparable. You can still hear the echo of your giggles bouncing off the classroom walls, the smell of shared tiffin boxes, the drama of who sat with whom. You said forever like it was a promise carved in stone. But time, ever the trickster, carved it in sand instead.
You still keep each other on social media, liking photos of birthdays and brunches. You call that staying in touch, but if you’re honest, time doesn’t keep in touch with anyone.
Some friendships don’t explode. They evaporate. One missed call, then two. A postponed plan, then none. You both move forward, telling yourselves you’ll catch up soon. You never do. Yet when their name pops up years later, your heart still softens. Because you know what you had was real; it just belonged to a different version of you.
Then there are the lovers. Oh, the lovers.
Time casts a spell on you but you won’t forget me.
‘Silver Springs’, Fleetwood Mac
I know I could have loved you but you would not let me.
You remember the one who made time feel slow, how every glance was a poem, every touch a prophecy. You thought love could pause clocks. You thought if you felt enough, time would show mercy. But love and time have never been friends.
One day, you wake up, and they’ve become a story you tell instead of a person you call. You still catch fragments of them in songs, in cities, in other people’s mannerisms. Not because you haven’t moved on, but because love doesn’t vanish. It simply changes shape.
You’ve learnt that love is not always about staying. Sometimes it’s about letting each other evolve in separate directions. Sometimes the most loving thing you can do is walk away before resentment sets in.
And still, every once in a while, you catch yourself wondering how they are. You imagine them somewhere else, laughing again, healed maybe. And instead of jealousy, you feel a strange warmth. Because this is what time does, it turns heartbreak into history.
Family, too, shifts under time’s quiet pressure.
You notice it when your parents start asking for help with things they used to do effortlessly. When the people who once tucked you in now look smaller under the weight of their own years. When you realise you’ve become the adult in the room.
It’s terrifying and tender all at once.
You start memorising details like you’re afraid they’ll disappear. The exact shade of your mother’s hands, the rhythm of your father’s laugh, the way your sister’s voice cracks when they pretend not to cry. You hold it all, greedy for permanence in a world that refuses to promise it.
And then there are the new faces.
The ones who arrive when you least expect it.
You meet people who feel like late blessings; souls who fit into your life like they were written into the script long ago but missed their cue. They don’t replace what was lost; they expand what’s left.
With them, you learn that connection doesn’t always need history. Sometimes it’s enough to simply exist in the same moment, both aware of how fragile and miraculous it is that two timelines have aligned.
Time is cruel, yes. But it’s also generous. For every person it takes away, it sends another. For every chapter it closes, it opens one with different handwriting, different laughter, different lessons.
You stop asking why things ended and start asking what they taught you. You stop hoarding people like souvenirs and start loving them like seasons. Some were summer: loud, bright, unforgettable. Some were autumn: warm but fleeting. Some were winter: cold but cleansing.
And some, rare as spring after drought, stay.
The gallery changes every year. Some portraits get dustier; some are taken down. But every one of them shaped you. Every one of them left fingerprints on your timeline.
You walk through the gallery again, and this time, you don’t cry. You just nod. You whisper thank you to the ghosts. And you walk back into the present, lighter, lonelier, wiser, but still willing to love again.
Because if time is a spell, then people are its incantations.
They arrive, enchant, and depart.
And we, spellbound, keep learning how to let them.
The world: seasons that don’t ask.
Cities don’t stay the same; they only pretend to. You leave for a while and come back to find your old haunts replaced by cafés with neon signs and menus that use too many adjectives. The corner shop man has retired. The streetlight that used to flicker has finally given up. Even the air feels different; less monsoon, more memory.
It hits you then: the world is ageing too.
The roads you once ran down barefoot now feel narrower. The khau gali bench where your teenage heart first broke has been repainted, erasing even the scratches you carved into it. The skyline has changed, but so has your gaze. You used to look up at buildings and feel small; now you look around and feel detached, like a tourist in your own life.
Time doesn’t just move through people; it moves through places. Through cultures. Through sound.
The songs that once screamed rebellion now play in nostalgic cafés. The slang that defined your generation becomes ironic TikTok audio. You scroll past your own history repackaged as retro by these kids using the same fonts, the same filters, the same feelings, but sold as Gen Alpha and a hashtag. How can you make a 19 year old feel old? It’s mind boggling.
The world has learnt to rebrand itself faster than you can process.
And yet, beneath the new logos and language, something timeless hums. The way strangers still look at sunsets. The way children still point at aeroplanes. The way rain still hushes a city into momentary silence. Some things refuse to evolve; they just keep showing up, season after season, like loyal ghosts.
You realise “home” was never a fixed coordinate. It’s the streetlight glow on a late walk. The playlist you play when you can’t sleep. The smell of old paper. The laughter that sounds like safety.
Home migrates with you. It’s wherever you recognise yourself, even for a second.
You grow softer towards change. You stop mourning what the world used to be and start marvelling at how it keeps reinventing itself. Like you, it’s just trying to survive the spell.
Because everything ages, even the light on the walls, even the laughter in rooms that once held you. And time, mischievous as ever, makes sure you fall in love with it anyway.
Mortality: the final countdown.
There’s a point when the ticking stops sounding abstract. When you start counting time not in years lived, but in people lost.
You notice it in the small pauses: the empty chair at dinner, the silent phone that used to buzz too often. Death doesn’t always arrive with fanfare. Sometimes it’s just absence that lingers like perfume.
You grow up hearing that life is short, but you don’t believe it until you start measuring it in goodbyes. The funerals blur together, and yet each one carves a new hollow. You start saving voicemails, photos, receipts, as if evidence could outsmart entropy.
But death, like time, doesn’t bargain. It just reminds you to look closer.
You begin to see how sacred the ordinary is. A shared cup of tea. The sound of someone breathing next to you. The way sunlight lands differently every morning. You start saying “I love you” without rehearsing it. You start noticing how quickly a conversation can become a last one.
Mortality isn’t the enemy. It’s the reason meaning exists.
It’s what turns moments into miracles. What gives weight to laughter and urgency to kindness. You realise that every person you’ve ever met is a temporary constellation; bright for a while, then gone, leaving patterns you’ll trace forever.
You stop rushing. You stop performing permanence. You start calling your parents just to hear their voices. You take pictures, not for posting, but for remembering. You cry when someone says something beautiful. You forgive faster, hold longer, breathe deeper.
We’re all time travellers heading towards the same ending. Some of us just stop pretending otherwise.
And one day, you’ll be the memory someone clings to. Your voice will echo in their head like a song they can’t find anymore. Your handwriting will look like history. The thought is terrifying… but tender.
Maybe the point isn’t to outrun death, but to dance with it. To live so vividly that when it comes, it finds you mid-laughter, mid-love, mid-life.
After all, every clock is a reminder — not of how little time you have, but of how much beauty fits inside it.
The spell’s secret (acceptance).
There’s peace in surrender; not the kind that gives up, but the kind that finally exhales.
After all the aching, the chasing, the losing, you arrive at stillness. You sit with time, no longer as its victim but as its companion. You pour it tea. You stop asking for more and start using what’s left.
Maybe this was the secret all along: time’s spell isn’t to curse us, but to teach us how to see.
You begin to notice the quiet grace of impermanence. The way flowers don’t mourn their own wilting. The way waves crash knowing they’ll fade. The way every sunset bleeds into night, unapologetic. Nothing clings, everything contributes.
You start saying thank you more. Thank you to the days that hurt and the ones that healed. Thank you to the versions of you that didn’t make it. Thank you to the hands that held you, even briefly.
Because maybe time isn’t a thief. Maybe it’s an artist. Painting you in layers, sanding you into meaning, teaching you to see beauty in the blur.
You stop fearing change because you finally understand — nothing lasting would ever move you. It’s the fleeting that teaches you how to feel.
So you make peace with the ticking. You start keeping rhythm with it. You live slower, softer, truer. You let people go without resentment. You let yourself stay without guilt.
And one evening, maybe years from now, maybe tomorrow, you’ll look at the sky, the same one you’ve watched since childhood, and realise: you’re not racing against time anymore. You’re moving with it.
The clock still trembles, but so do you, alive, aware, grateful.
Time casts a spell on us all.
Not to destroy. Not even to transform.
But to remind us that nothing, not even endings, are wasted.
And as the spell settles, you understand at last, the real magic was never time. It was the living.
Want more words that bite back, feelings that don’t apologise, and essays that overshare just enough? Welcome to Her Campus at MUJ, where self-doubt meets soft rebellion. This one’s from Niamat Dhillon at HCMUJ, powered by insomnia, introspection, and entirely too much caffeine.