“Fleeting moments that become like an eternity.” It’s simple, but it’s one of the most memorable lines in any book I’ve read. The quote comes from Peter Hoeg’s “Borderliners.” Its meaning is also simple: Time is something one has to hold onto.

Where does time go when you stop writing your thoughts down? Where does time go when you let it run over you like the individual streams from a waterfall? For the past few weeks I sat basking in its existence, enjoying it, forgetting each passing second as it emulated another droplet. Since the last time, summer had arrived and the sky made no small deal out of this. It appears happy again; blue again, in a colour that would make the Aegean turn an envious green. And like the Aegean, it appears timeless. I am sitting at my desk and I am rereading Antoine de Saint-Exubery’s “The Little Prince.” I ended up reading the whole book again out of want of rereading one particular chapter, for one particular passage. As soon as I happened upon Chapter 21, I was reminded why I wanted to revisit it in the first place.

“Just that,” said the fox. “To me, you are still nothing more than a little boy who is just like a hundred thousand other little boys. And I have no need of you. And you, on your part, have no need of me. To you, I am nothing more than a fox like a hundred thousand other foxes. But if you tame me, then we shall need each other. To me, you will be unique in all the world. To you, I shall be unique in all the world…”

We were but two people amongst a multitude of others, unique only to the people that knew us. There are things she said that made me rethink this part of one of my favourite stories. Her words reminded me of her stance in this world, which we now share. They reminded me that there is a beauty inside of her that was blind to the world; a beauty that was once untamed. She would tell me otherwise, but I try not to disagree with her too much. I know very well that if a person were ever perfect, they would be completely oblivious of their own perfection. And in my eyes she was completely oblivious of herself.

She had always told me in her own words that we were just two ordinary people trying to make sense of the things around us; we were just two ordinary people like the many out there who tried to understand the way things are and came to be. We were inquisitive creatures that freely foraged for our nuts and berries like squirrels in an emerald forest. The world was our grand forest and the answers it contained were our nuts and berries; they were our very means of sustenance. It is just unfortunate that answers are not as easy to catch as falling acorns. They are very much unlike the dew one could collect by brushing one’s hands through blades of grass on a cold spring’s morning. Answers also have no natural receptacle with which to be contained outside of our minds, so it is inside there that we search, and by law of their abstraction they cannot be collected in a net like the butterflies that roam and flutter in their best imitation of human hearts over orchards in the summer.

Maybe she’s right. We really are just two people, but what separates us from everyone else is that we are unique to each other. We are unique in this way because the heart refuses to be tamed so easily. It doesn’t obey like the cracks from a whip are intelligible to a lion. It takes time to ease comfortably into the social strata of someone else’s space and remains untamed till it is handled with the right care by the right person; someone who truly understands the world the same way because that’s the way they’ve been seeing it their whole life too.

Time is indeed a relative thing. And look how much time has passed since you last noticed it trickling past you. In the meantime that has just passed I have learned many things. I am another step closer to understanding the great enigma we have all come to question, and oh, how I learned of my tendency to question things! Is it not in our very nature to have a mind clouded with doubt and answers that seem so elusive that they have the power to drive a curious heart onwards along a most potentially perilous and turbulent journey?

We look around ourselves for answers. We pause. We hesitate. We turn our questions around in our hands and allow them to dance and take form like potter’s clay. But more often than not, they seep through the gaps we create between our fingers as we try to shape them into something we can understand. We all set about trying to find answers in different things, depending on what makes sense to us. I have always looked for answers to my own questions in stories; words stringently arranged and strung linearly in a manner that I can step into. I have always believed that one person’s story is another person’s inspiration. No matter how difficult a story is to listen to or how easy it is to conjure up in the mind, a story is a previously traversed ravine. It is a path from a single point to another that once never existed. Stories may be fictional or factual, but in your mind they are very much as alive as the temperamental dragon that lives at the bottom of your garden.

How limited time is when one forgets about it. I have said in the past that time is relative. At that time, I only understood its meaning up to a certain extent. As I read my old words back, they took on a new meaning; a new life. Sometimes time really does flow like water tracing paths down a steep mountain. Sometimes it trickles by so slowly like thick syrup clinging to the sides of a decanted container and it’s at those latter times that I feel things could be better. If you can look back into the past and wonder how so much time has passed, you can be sure you’ve led a happy past.

Time is the crux of life. Its passage permits life to be perpetually mutable; to forever be facilitating change. I am aware that much has changed since the last time I noticed and that things continue on their course, constantly changing, whether I acknowledge it or not. But I continue to embrace it all with the same hope that anyone unsure of their own future does. All one can do is accept that time will never wait for us and that change will never wait for us. They just happen, so one just has to accept them. The one thing that doesn’t just happen is appreciation. We have always been granted the freedom to exercise our minds and our hearts and with them the uncapped potential to appreciate. It takes time to realise this.

And then when you do, it’s an abrupt realisation and it changes you quicker than you could notice autumnal leaves taking on their new colour. You wake up in the middle of the night to the call of nature, but not the kind you may have been used to. It’s a different type of nature that once felt unnatural but now feels as natural as the cool breeze that gingerly caresses your exposed skin on a winter’s morning. It ratifies all the thoughts you had carefully packaged over the years and it comes in the form of an inner voice that tells you you’ve never ever felt like this before, about anyone. The upturned sides of my mouth are without a shadow of a doubt called smiles, for now they come to exist because of specific things; a person, a face and the things I feel when I take a moment to conjure her up through my closed eyes.

I remember the very first time we held each other, cloaked by the presence of darkness in the room. It was dark enough for me to only be able to see outlines. I looked at the silhouette before me and with my eyes, traced lines, illustrating the soft features of her face. Under the disguise of night, I had to draw on my memory to paint an accurate picture. With each progressing moment my eyes became more accustomed to the darkness, and in their adjustment her visage slowly took on more detail as though it really were I who had painted her into existence. And then when I finally see her I am reminded of all the other things in her that I cannot see with my eyes.

“Goodbye,” said the fox. “And now here is my secret, a very simple secret: It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.”

She makes me smile. She makes me laugh. And my heart can’t help but follow.