Taking Advantage of the Time You Have

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The other night, I had a dream that there was a demon living in my basement. I don’t even have a basement, but in my dream, it was large and dark; black and murky. The demon had the face of an old man, without skin or teeth. In my dream, there was a toddler living in my home, and it innocently wandered into the cold, dark, demon basement, unaware that it was entering some sort of hell. I stood on a wooden staircase as the toddler, draped in a long, white shirt, was swallowed up by the demon. I couldn’t move, my legs cemented to the stairs. Dreams are like that sometimes-infuriating and bleak; terrorizing and hollow. I woke up in a cold sweat, feeling as if I had no control over anything, and like I might be gone at any minute.

Death might have been the theme of my dream, but it’s also, sort of, the theme of life. Nothing new can regenerate without death, and as obvious as that is, we don’t like to think about it.

The immediacy of life struck me especially hard because I’ve begun to notice how time seems to come and go almost imperceptibly. When I was young, I would count down the days from Thanksgiving to Christmas, carefully marking off each day on my calendar. The excitement of the holiday was thrilling, my days were relatively dull, and I let my small self get caught up in the…