You Can Take Your Time, But What If We Run Out Of Time?

 Jimmy Bay
Jimmy Bay

What if tomorrow comes and I’m no longer here? What if I leave tomorrow? What if I die tomorrow? Will you regret it? Will you finally understand that waiting is nothing but a waste of time?

Will it finally hit you that those messages you were afraid to send were exactly what you should’ve sent? Will you finally understand that people don’t wait forever? People don’t live forever, so you might as well take a chance while they’re here, while they’re present and while they’re willing to give you their all.

Will you finally understand that if you wait till you’re ready, you may never get a chance to be with that person? You may never get a chance to tell them how you really feel.

The thing is, you think you have all the time in the world. So you take your time responding to their messages, you take your sweet time to make up your mind about them, you talk to plenty of people because you’re still not so sure, you still don’t know how you feel, you think that they’ll always be there, welcoming you back when you’ve finally decided to give them a chance.

But you don’t think of the other scenario, the other part of the equation, the side that could blindside you and take that person away from you overnight. You don’t think about that. You only think about how you want it to play out, how you want it to work.

You don’t think of what might happen when you run out of time, when that person moves to another country, when that person gets engaged, when that person loses their life in an accident.

You don’t realize that maybe all that person needed was you before they took their own life away. You don’t realize that sometimes you can save a person, sometimes you can be exactly what they need to live through another day but you’re so busy thinking about your fears, your options, the things you’ll miss out on because you think you can always come back, you think they will always be there.

You forget that life doesn’t wait for anyone. You forget that time doesn’t care about your priorities.

So maybe you need to just send that text anyway, maybe you should just go on that date and figure out what you want as you go, maybe you should just tell someone you like them or that you want more, maybe you should send that ‘I miss you’ that’s been eating you alive or that ‘I’m sorry’ that someone else has been dying to hear. Maybe you should just say ‘I love you’ even if you don’t hear it back and maybe you need to stop taking your damn time every single time. Maybe you need to live more in the moment instead of calculating everything you do.

Because one day, you’re going to look back and realize that even if you lost a person, it wasn’t your fault, it was something bigger than you. You did all you could to keep them with you — to show them that they’re loved.

And one day, you might realize that while you were so afraid of making a move because you didn’t want to lose a person, you lost them anyway but with a bunch of regrets and unspoken words.

Sometimes you just have to beat time before it beats you. Thought Catalog Logo Mark

Rania Naim is a poet and author of the new book All The Words I Should Have Said, available here.

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Writing makes me feel alive. Words heal me.

Keep up with Rania on Instagram

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