In a Time Lapse

By Peter Bowden

When he was a boy, time felt like something he could outrun. Summers stretched long and loose, afternoons bending under the weight of cicadas and heat. He believed days were handed out one by one, endless as marbles in a jar, and that tomorrow would always wait exactly where he left it. He watched shadows slide across the porch boards and thought they were only playing. Grown-ups said things like already? and before you know it, but he couldn’t see what they were rushing from. He stood still, certain the world would circle him forever.

Then time began to speed up, the way film does when someone turns the dial without warning. Birthdays stacked closer together. Voices he knew changed pitch and texture. His hands grew larger than his father’s old tools, and his mother’s face collected small lines she didn’t notice but he did. Days stopped arriving one at a time and began showing up in clusters; school years, jobs, moves, hellos and goodbyes. He learned that memory has a sound: doors closing softly behind you. He learned that love leaves fingerprints on everything it touches, and that loss moves quietly, like dusk, so you don’t realize it’s night until the stars appear.

Now, when he looks back, the boy is still there, paused in the frame, sunburned and hopeful, squinting into a future he can’t imagine. Time hasn’t taken him; it has carried him forward, folding him into every version of himself that followed. The trick, he’s learned, isn’t stopping the lapse or slowing the reel. It’s noticing the light in each frame before it changes. It’s understanding that even as time rushes past, it leaves behind something permanent: proof that he was here, that he watched, that he loved, and that, for a moment, the world moved at the speed of his breathing.

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