I could hear the muffled chattering of my teeth as I reached in my coat pocket for my gray winter gloves. Barely feeling the soft wool material, my fingertips edged dangerously close to succumbing to the numbness that had already taken over my toes. The colorless forest around me resonated with an impressive allure of foreboding elegance as its grandeur stood guard around the dark pond. A thin layer of ice trapped parts of the pond under its frosted cage. Squinting, I could make out the snow-white shore on the other side. It looked eerily undisturbed. The thick layer of ice had deterred visitors from walking there. Looking down, I saw that the snow had melted on my side of the pond, exposing the wet sedimentary rocks that blanketed the ground. As a slight wind blew in my direction, the small ripples of the otherwise calm water surface glided towards me, creating an illusion of that of an animated silk cloth. The ripples widened just as they neared the edge of the shore, until they disappearing entirely, crashing gently onto the rocks. The pond was a greenish black, seemingly bottomless to anyone looking down from the shore. The dull grayness of the sky failed to block out the sun, as a soft muted glare created a blurry path of ragged glimmers on the pond surface.

It seemed like only yesterday that I was sitting on the same boulder looking out onto the different arrays of golden greens and yellows reflected on a clear blue water. The same pond had undergone drastic changes in just under two months. The cozy autumnal scene I was most familiar with was gone, leaving behind not one sign that it had ever existed. A feeling of bittersweet nostalgia rolled over me like the warm fall breezes that had come and gone. The two months had felt like two weeks and looking back, I never seemed to have grasped the concept of changing seasons. The realization that nature around me had shape shifted into an assortment of bare branches and icy fields of wilted grass had strangely only struck me at that precise second.

In the flurry of events that consumed my daily life, I had turned a blind eye to the beauty ever present in the backdrop. Every moment that I experienced was just another part of a fast-paced slideshow of occurrences that would be lost within the identical memories of my soon-to-be past. The tedious necessities of everyday life had exhausted my creative vision while academic homework, assessments, and standardized learning had forced me to enter a one-way, narrow street. Time was passing by as quickly as the seasons had left me; I was aging.

It seemed as though time moved at its own pace while I was still under the misconception that it was under my control. Under the stress and pressure of my present, my mind had unwillingly turned towards the stark, two-dimensional realities of life, but ironically, it had failed to realize the abruptness of time - the foundation to all of our realities' existence. Perhaps it was because I was not ready to take on such responsibilities. Although growth was unavoidable, I sometimes found myself desperately clinging onto the memories of the past, unwilling to let them go. My reluctance had begun to shroud my imagination and creative awareness. Time was going by quickly but my fear for the future obstructed my willingness to accept changes, let alone notice them.

Time, although abstract and fluid, is said to be measured in stages, whether it be by the seconds, the minutes, the hours, the days, the weeks, or even a lifetime. Much like myself, humans often make the mistake of seeking comfort in the infinite nature of time’s life span while they are too quick to forget that their lifespan has a definite ending.