In eleventh grade, I wrote in an essay: “my life is like a bus: full of various people, thoughts, changing scenes, with countless smells, noise, laughter, love, questions, constantly conflicting opinions, an inconsistent stream of thoughts, because I am also inconsistent, CHANGING and growing. Being!”
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Now, three years later, I am a passenger who doesn’t know which bus to get on, doesn’t know where to go, what to do once I get there, doesn’t know if I’ll have a chance to return home afterwards, or if there will be time to live. My buses travel the same road every day, but my soul travels others: somewhere in the past and future, somewhere climbing the Andes and sailing the Ganges River, somewhere stuck in traffic and floating in the Pacific Ocean watching El Niño do its work, and in yet another, parallel life, going to collect a doctoral degree diploma…
In eleventh grade, everything was simpler. I was full of hope, like an optimist buying lottery tickets. One day… I will do, achieve, be, become, travel, love, know… and most importantly, I always believed I would have TIME. Time to live, time to be… just TIME…
Back then, riding the bus, I listened to what others were saying. Women usually talked about what they cooked (I don’t know how they don’t get tired of this topic?). Once, an older man sitting opposite me told a friend on the phone how he was going to the jungle to buy anti-hallucination medicine (to my great disappointment, he never mentioned the specific location). One winter evening, two elderly women sat in front of me. I watched the rapidly changing scenes outside the window – it was too dark to see anything. Suddenly, the two strangers started talking! One of them mentioned that every winter she goes to Asia: to Bali, to Thailand, to Sri Lanka, or wherever her eyes can see. Well, you know, why should I pay for that firewood? It’s totally not worth it! They talked like that for a good hour, until I returned home from Šilainiai, across all of Kaunas… Sherlock Holmes, upon returning, wrote everything down in a notebook – I always liked collecting stories.
Now I no longer have time to listen on the bus – I’m learning German words, listening to podcasts about culture, doing homework, or reading advanced English “LinkedIn” posts. I’m rushing not because I’m running out of time, but because ALL of us no longer have time. Time is now worth not money, but life itself.
A few years ago, one night, when it was deadly silent, I accidentally touched my heart… and it was rushing, running and running. And you know what – it didn’t stop and didn’t even get tired! That time I thought, where are you rushing, where are you running? How will I catch up with you? But suddenly the thought struck me that I myself have been living in the future for some time, somewhere there and nowhere… And, in fact, it cannot catch up with me. And I realized that childhood was over. My time emerged. Like a snake, I shed the skin that had surrounded me for many years. The skin of time. In that skin remained my childhood summers, when I ran barefoot through the long village grass and secretly picked flowers from my grandmother’s flower garden, when my father built me a deckchair in the rye field near the abyss so I could read my thick book (I no longer remember what it was about). But I didn’t read, because I had time to be lazy… I just lay in the hot midday sun, not even thinking about the damage caused by UV rays, and listened to the silence. I heard such silence only once in my life. Sweet, like a ripe pear, ringing, like the changing pressure in a rising airplane, and such as only summer eternity can be. Without time, without flow, without purpose – just… Like cotton candy melting in the sun. Even after many years, I hope to experience such silence again someday, where time stops.
It’s summer now too, I’m writing, sitting next to the same rye field. Frowning from the sun’s rays and barely seeing the computer screen, I hear the letters of the keyboard clattering quickly. I’m rushing again. I’m almost late to finish writing this essay. If summer is cold like spring, I won’t get a tan. I WON’T MAKE ITTT… the word spins in my mind more often than I can comprehend…
In twelfth grade, my English teacher asked me how I manage everything: Olympics, photography, studies, and a whole cornucopia of other activities. After thinking for a moment, I said: “I only don’t have time to sleep” (back then I didn’t know that in a few years there would be almost no time to sleep, ugh those studies!). But thinking about it, my big life question: “will I make it?” began in 2024, when I was supposed to finish school and the world was hit by war. When I suddenly realized that in the dreamed-of 21st century, I no longer had rights to my own life’s time. I realized that I don’t really need academics, I don’t need university, I don’t need any degrees… The one and only thing I dreamed of my whole life was to travel and be a photographer. And if I no longer have time in life, I don’t want to spend it calculating algorithms or making fifteen slides a month.
Then I always remembered my great-grandmother, who had time to live. She would sit and, already completely blind, knit as fast as I now type on a keyboard. While she could, she read books; she ate unhurriedly, slowly drank tea, and with great pleasure held fizzy candies in her mouth, the same ones she would fill my backpack with after summer visits to her. Seeing how sharp-minded she was until the last minute of her life, I secretly always wanted to meet my eighty-year-old self and find out what our life was like: did we travel a lot, did we learn and achieve a lot, was it scary… But in 2024, I realized that might not happen. People who in old age can say: “I didn’t do it because I was lazy, because I didn’t want to, because I was afraid,” now seem to have the privilege of choice; because my generation simply might not have time…
When I was little and went to kindergarten, I dreamed of school; when I went to school, I dreamed of growing up and being a writer. Now, having grown up, I dream of finishing my doctorate and traveling for at least ten years… But in truth, I’m LYING. I haven’t been dreaming for a while now. Dreaming has become scary. The word “hope” sounds like a bad joke, like a word full of uncertainty…
After school, an unplanned “gap year” occurred, and realizing that I was still alive and healthy – I felt relieved. Everyone was living their lives again. Someone said: “you get used to war,” and I really did. I just existed. I studied fashion, the sewing machine hummed at home, I walked around covered in threads, collected needles scattered around the table, wandered through fabric stores, and my time belonged to me again… I was happy. While learning like this, another academic year flew by. In autumn, after changing my field of study and entering the university doors for the first time, I remembered myself in primary school, standing with a heart fluttering with fear. My heart fluttered again, but now everything was different… Before, it was scary to make mistakes, but now – it’s scary not to manage to take everything possible from life. After the first year, I think my hope to do everything and make it on time came true. I made it almost everywhere; sometimes I noticed life-changing offers late, but, like Cinderella before midnight, I managed to submit, do, or at least try… My calendar is still buzzing with activities that I now plan a month in advance before the month even begins, but how good it feels when I later cross everything out (still old-fashioned with a pencil), and my heart flutters – you made it.
At the university talent camp, we had to share our dreams with people we already knew and new acquaintances… I dreamed again that peace would come to the world and we could live again, pursue our goals, not rush, and enjoy existence. Another girl hoped to always be happy, but I was greatly surprised by the dream of the guy in our group. He wanted to look at his children in the last three minutes of his life and be proud that they grew up to be wonderful people.
Perhaps truly? We must believe and not lose hope that we will reach old age, fulfill our dreams, see our children, our blood, language, and culture grow, taking root with penetrating roots in the increasingly drying earth of the world, and raising their own fruits, which we once dreamed of, they will heal all the Earth’s scars with their love… I hope they will speak Lithuanian; passed down and cherished by ancestors whom I no longer even know – understandable only to us. I hope the world will be as I experienced it until eleventh grade, as it was in childhood, when I didn’t count my life’s time in the calendar by seconds, minutes, and hours… I didn’t need to. I had the right to allow myself to be: to listen to the rustling of the wind, to get cold in the summer shade, to fall asleep five times while reading Jules Verne’s travels, in the boundless darkness of the night, together with crickets, to watch the stars and be afraid that a bat wouldn’t get tangled in my gently wind-tossed hair…
To create, to write, and to be. The remedies for despair of all times. Mekas, Ivanauskaitė, Camus, Kafka, Mačernis. All rushed to live in their own way, all in their haste did more than those who had time… My hope now is momentary, like a lottery ticket. I hope I’ll write the test well, that no one will cut the grass today and I won’t have allergies, that today there will be time to talk with mom about medicine, Montessori philosophy, or just something interesting, and dad will give another lesson on politics, geography, music, architecture, or photography (I still don’t understand how they don’t get tired of being interested in everything?). Hope is actually quite simple. We ourselves turned it into a distant, intangible future; people themselves taught young souls to think about what they would do in five years… WE did that ourselves. I hope that… now, sitting in the same village meadows of my childhood, and listening to the songs of birds and crickets, no hungry tick is crawling on me… Ugh, how hard it is to constantly hope for something! But even now, writing this essay, I hope for something. You can’t know if you don’t try…
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