Before I Had the Words, I Had Time

By: Astrid Sarmiento a.k.a Lil Poetrid

They say time is an illusion. If that is true, then why have I spent my entire life feeling it?

Not clocks. Not calendars. Time itself.

Some of my earliest memories are not of toys or cartoons, but of change. Of becoming. Of knowing that the moment I was living would someday belong to the past.

One of my earliest childhood memories is standing inside my playpen, watching my family walk by. I was perhaps only three years old, yet this memory has lived rent-free in my heart ever since.

Many times, my parents and sister would occasionally glance over and ask if I loved them. The most peculiar thing is that despite being so young, I strangely understood their question.

To amuse my family, I would look up and shake my head, motioning "no" to them, and laugh while I ran from one side to another inside my playpen.

Another memory I recall is my father leaving for work. Before he walked out the door, he would hand me my bottle.

Such a simple gesture. A routine, perhaps. Something he probably did without much thought as he prepared for another day.

Yet decades later, I still remember it.

I do not remember every toy I owned, every book I read, every meal I ate, or every television show I watched.

But I remember my father handing me my bottle before he left for work.

Maybe memory has its own wisdom.

Maybe it knows which moments matter most.

Perhaps that is why the smallest acts of love often survive the longest.

A bottle in a tiny hand.

A father heading out the door.

A child feeling cared for without yet having the words to describe the feeling.

I often wonder how much children truly understand. Adults tend to believe that understanding arrives with age, but I am not so sure.

I think children understand far more than we give them credit for. They may lack the vocabulary to explain what they know, but they absorb everything.

The atmosphere in a room.

The emotions behind a smile.

The rhythm of a family's love.

The passage of time.

Perhaps that is why some childhood memories remain so vivid. They are not merely memories of events. They are memories of awareness itself.

What fascinates me is not that I remember the playpen. It is that I oddly remember my thoughts and fears at that age too.

I remember looking at the adults around me and realizing that one day I would be like them.

One day, I thought, I would be out of this playpen, walking freely through this apartment, and somehow become one of the grown-ups.

It sounds like such a simple thought, but it carried a strange weight even then. I remember feeling small. Not just physically small, but temporarily small.

As if I were standing at the beginning of a very long road.

Years later, standing in the middle of a crowded family party at my tia's apartment, I felt something similar.

Music played in the background. Conversations overlapped. Laughter drifted from room to room, and everyone danced until the sun came up.

Yet beneath the joy of being surrounded by people I loved, there was a strange certainty and ache again.

Nothing unusual was happening.

Yet I remember standing there and thinking: someday all of the people in this living room will be gone.

I knew, somehow, that I needed to savor the moment. I needed to remember because one day that gathering would exist only in memory.

I was only ten or twelve years old. Far too young, perhaps, to be thinking about mortality.

Yet the thought arrived anyway.

I did not know who would leave first.

I did not know how life would unfold.

I only knew that the moment was precious because it would not last.

Years have passed since that party.

Some of the people from that room are gone now.

Others have grown older.

Children became adults.

Adults became grandparents.

And somehow, I became the person who remembers. Sometimes I wonder if I have always been unusually aware of how temporary everything is.

Or perhaps I have simply always loved life enough to notice its passing. Maybe that is why certain memories never leave me.

A playpen.

A bottle in my father's hand before work.

A crowded family party.

None of these moments seemed extraordinary when they happened.

Yet they became extraordinary because they ended.

And perhaps that is the lesson time has been teaching me all along.

The things we miss most are rarely the grand events. They are the ordinary moments we somehow knew were special while we were still living them.

Maybe that is why I have spent my entire life feeling time. Not because time is slipping away.

But because, even as a child, I understood something I would spend the rest of my life trying to put into words:

Every beautiful moment is already becoming a memory.

And perhaps that is what makes it beautiful in the first place.