Advanced Essay #1: Time Flies

Introduction:

This paper, to me, was intended to express my fear and love of time. I wanted to demonstrate the fragility of a moment, and how something so meaningless to one person can be the result of a lifetime for another. I think that I did a good job using description and painting a picture for my audience, but I think I could do better at tying my ideas together in the future. I wish I’d done a better job of getting my message out the way I see it in my head because I think it got a bit blurred. My future writing will reflect that, but overall, I am pretty happy with what I created.

Small cafes and restaurants line the sidewalk. It is getting dark and we are trying to pick the perfect place to eat. A street light blares down on us and illuminates the concrete. At my feet, I see a man and woman together, in love, trailed by a sea of green. Smiles like no other envelope their faces, the corners of their lips creeping to their ears as they look out of the carriage to the brand new scenery. Above them, words stretch across the tree coated sky. One yellow followed by white, alternating like the sun peaking through clouds, reading “honeymoon in manhattan.” The couple’s gaze travels up and lands on the “moon,” awaiting their adventure. I reach down to get a better look, and realize that what I thought was a newspaper was really a stack of record covers. Beautiful colors and fonts and patterns lay abandoned on the street with their musical partners sitting neatly beside them. I let out a shriek of joy and stop my family.

“Look!” I say. “There’s tons of them!”

They follow to where I’m squatting and leaf through the antique records on the curb. We grab as many as we can hold, and carry them with us to dinner.

Back in Philadelphia, I pin up each record cover with care. They line the wall below my window and each one brought a little magic to my bedroom. Antiques are special in that way. They are from a different time, were used by different people, and bring their stories with them wherever they go. Who knows where these records started, but they ended up on the streets of New York, and now they’ve come to bring their stories to Philadelphia.

Time blows my mind whenever I think about it. There are different time zones, which means while I’m waking up, other people are fast asleep, others are eating lunch, and other people are going to bed. When I travelled this summer, I experienced this first hand. If I got up early enough in the morning, my friends might still be awake, and later in the day they would just be rising. All of this was happening at the exact same moment, but it was technically different times. How could it be two times at once? How does time stop? Why does time stop for me? Who else was wondering about this with me? I often think about the people who are doing the exact same thing I am doing but around the world, or people who have stood in the same places that I stand. Regardless of what currently covers the land, someone was there, someone came before me, and someone will come after without ever knowing I existed. These records made me think about their stories that I’d never know, and the one I will leave behind. Everything happens at the same time and people cross paths without ever realizing, and I want people to know where I’ve been. Not for my own fame, but because I helped someone. I want for someone’s life to have changed for the better because I was in it, regardless of if the world remembers my name. When I found those records, I couldn’t help but feel the connections they’d had with past owners. First kisses to the soft tunes of a musical soundtrack, angry nights spent listening to loud rock. The life events of another left behind and leaving their mark. When my time is up, I want my accomplishments to leave their mark so that I too can be remembered.