I have moments during the day where I stop everything and realize I am alive. It’s an awfully frightening moment, as the realization kicks in that one day, I’ll also have to die. But somehow, I have lived up until this point. I’m always the oldest I will ever be. It’s a blessing to live, but so, so terrifying. You only have one chance at existence. You only have one shot to make a molecular mark on this world, much less this universe.

I have moments during the day where all my breath is knocked out of my lungs when I realize how small I am, compared to the rapidly expanding universe around me. There will be a day, an hour, a minute, a second, where everything ends. One day, the universe will die, and we will die with it.

I have moments during the day where I am reminded that my existence was almost impossible. If my grandfather wasn’t stubborn enough to immigrate, if my nana never had my mother, if anything would have changed, I would have never been born to live to this moment to write whatever this is on my laptop.

I have moments where I look all around me and realize these people around me have such complex lives, but yet they are so simple. The human experience is so individual and so unique that no one can say if a life is simple or complex. It is merely a grey area of both. Maybe I’ll only be a person in a crowd.

I had moments when I was young and innocent where I would try to imagine what nothingness feels like. All I saw in my mind was the earth rotating, all I could imagine was silence. It would scare me. Is that was death is? Silence?

I have moments now where I randomly remember my name briefly, and the part I play in this life. I am not important now. I am a student. I am a teenager. In theory, I could change everything about myself within a night. I could chop off my hair, shave my eyebrows, and burn my room. But I won’t. That is not a part of my role in this life.
I have moments.
T.T.