The Lantern of Time

There will come a time when your days grow crowded, when there is no room left to give anyone your time. You will have an abundance of everything then... except one thing.

The person from whom you once gathered time with both hands and desire by the basketful—one day you will find that you have no time even for them. The longing to spend time with them will still burn fierce within you, yet time itself will elude you.

One day you will notice: the person you once would have abandoned all else to meet, the one you deemed worth every postponement—time will reshape this. Meeting them will fade into insignificance against the press of other duties. You will be forced to suppress your own yearning. Time gives mankind everything eventually, save only time itself.

Life is like that—like the hands of a clock... the very twelve that marks bright noon becomes the stroke of midnight. The same hand that brings light also brings darkness.

Life changes, time changes. There will come a moment when both necessity and the beloved slip away, discarded like used tissue paper, stripped of their worth. Time turns a person into a lantern and carries them away on winds unknown...

Then, many years later, when you look back, you will see: those once dearly loved have become unbearable, while those once despised have grown precious. You will discover you live quite well without people you once thought you could not survive a single day without. And yet you will spend your life with others you never planned to keep. Some who mattered once will vanish entirely from your thoughts. In the end, we live alongside strangers.

Life is like an unread thriller—you cannot know what lies on the final page, cannot grasp what will unfold, until you reach that last chapter. What feels today like the whole of your existence may one day become merely a paragraph in your story.