The Potential of a Day

Chapter 3: Time

Time

            “To us,” Sephie says, raising her juice box towards the sky. I still think it’s sort of lame, thirteen year olds having juice boxes. I roll my eyes, “to us.”

          It’s summer, the sun is blazing high in the sky, warming my face, and the huge oak tree, reaching out above us, looks magnificent, as if begging to be climbed. Today is my birthday, and, by default, Sephie’s as well. Our thirteenth birthday. Sephie asked for a puppy, I asked for a new laptop. Neither one of us got what we wanted.

          For a long while, both of us just lie there, and then Sephie lifts her hand again, this time without the silly, childish beverage in hand. She looks at her watch. “Twelve-o-three. I’m officially thirteen. Ha ha, I’m older than you, twerp,” Sephie is grinning like there’s no tomorrow, the cheeky smile I’ve never quite been able to mimic, “this is the only chance I get to say that.”

          “Just wait two minutes, and I’ll catch up.”

          “No you won’t. In years, you’ll be the same age as me, but I’ll still be two minutes older than you. That won’t change, it can’t.”

          We sit there for a moment, contemplating this. But Sephie won’t let my time of birth come and go without saying something more first. “Time is so weird. It just like, you know, passes. And there’s nothing you can do. One minute you’re twelve, and then your thirteen. Then suddenly you’re twenty, and forty five, and eighty, eventually you get to ninety three, and then, afterwards, you die. And there’s nothing you can do to stop it, any of it. You can’t pause time, it just goes and goes and goes. We are only conscious of the exact nanosecond in which we exist, and other than that, it’s just memory and prediction. The present is like, a non-existent tiny itty-bitty fraction of a second, but then the past is forever, and so is the future. It’s just so weird. It’s like, time is this absolute thing that we can’t go back on, or stop, or change, yet it’s also just a human construct. I mean, that I’m considered a year older than you thanks to two minutes is just silly, yet somehow, that’s how we think. Twelve you’re a kid, and thirteen you’re a teenager. And I can’t go back to being a kid. The moment I have thought a thought, it is in the past, and that will never be the present again. And it’s like, every second is just a second less in the time you have left to live. It’s all just so weird.”

          “Sephie, slow down, you’re losing me.”

          My sister turns her head to me, smiling, “I’m two minutes older than you, and no matter what you do, that will always be the case.”

          “Unless you die, then I’ll get to be older than you.”

          “I don’t intend on dying any time soon,” she says, “but technically, I could climb that tree, and fall, and my time would be over, and that would be that. No going back. It’s just so weird.”

          I giggle at my sister, “you’re weird.”

          “Lily?” she addresses me, turning her head to me once again, blinking her eyes juvenilely, “if I do die before you, I’m still the older one, okay? We’re a unit, so even if I’m gone, I’m still a part of you, okay? Always just there being two minutes older than you.”

          “Fine,” I pause a moment, “quick, what time is it?”

          Sephie looks at her watch, “twelve-o-five; happy birthday, Lily.”

          “Happy birthday, Sephie.”

          And that one was her very last.

          Half a year later, once the sun had pulled itself back a little tighter into a cool shell, the oak tree had lost its leaves, and the tactful drivers paid the extra cost for winter tires, Sephie’s time ended. No going back.