When you’re anxiously awaiting something, time gets distorted. It no longer follows a linear path, where you count down the days until what you’ve been waiting for. Instead, you follow it through loop de loops and pivots and re-runs, simply because your imagination is so strong.

Time neither speeds up or slows down. It follows a train that a warped three-year-old has constructed, going around in circles and boomerang tails.

Anticipation is a strange illusion. You spend weeks and weeks of your life imagining and re-imagining an event taking place, that when it actually happens, you find yourself comparing it to what your mind had dreamed.

Your fingers drum on hardtops, you find yourself preparing and re-preparing, wanting a moment to be nearly perfect. It’s false hope; events never play out exactly as you’d like them to. And that creates disappointment. It breeds frustration. Anticipation is a ruthless, lying thing.

And just like that, you’re looking around and the event has already happened. The experience of anticipation is replaced with nostalgia. The event has become solidified in your memory, hazed with the ruminations of your anticipation. Looking back, you can’t remember specific details. You can’t remember who said what and who sat where, but you remember overall emotion and sentiment.

 

– Daily Prompt