Did you ever have one of those moments where everything just hits you? All at once, at a hundred miles an hour, something just hits you head on. Sometimes you’re expecting it: you know it’s going to be coming eventually, but you suppress the thought to the back of your mind until it sneaks past security and puts you in a chokehold. Sometimes you have no idea: out of nowhere a storm swells and a strike of lightning cracks right in front of your toes. Sometimes it’s quick, and sometimes it slowly dawns on you. It’s called an epiphany, and it can happen anytime, anywhere, and when you least expect it.

Everyone has epiphanies. It’s that “Aha!” moment, that “holy shit this is actually happening” inner-monologue kind of stuff, and if you’ve never had something like that before, I can assure you that as you zoom through life at full speed, it’ll happen at least one time, but probably more. It’ll happen when you step off the gas even just a bit. It’ll happen when you stop accelerating so fast and you slow down for a second to see that all the blurs around you actually have shape. All of the sudden, you’re slowing down and enjoying the moment for a second, and you’re not paying attention and that’s when it hits you. That’s when the “holy shit this is actually happening” moment happens and then you’re sitting there looking around you as if everything is suddenly in such slow-motion for a second that it seems to be frozen and you’re like, “Wow, this is my last-first-day of high school.” or “Oh my god, this is the last day I'll ever spend in my hometown.” or “I can’t believe I'm already 20 years old.”

Epiphanies can be like a movie, where the character looks around at everything and it’s all slow-motion and beautiful and they sit there and can’t help but smile. In these moments, you stop and let it all sink in. In these moments, nothing else matters other than the fact that, right there, everything is absolutely perfect.

I haven’t stopped thinking about some epiphanies I've had. Many of them are images that are now engraved in my brain so deeply that if I close my eyes, I can still place myself in them, right then and there. I know that they're over now. They're just another memory, just another thing I realized I’d never be able to get back, another moment I realized that things are constantly changing, and I'm constantly growing, and my life is an ever-moving entity through time and space. And as much as I can’t wait to live all the next chapters of my life, I really don’t think I would mind reliving my epiphanies.