When Time Started Moving Differently
When I was younger, time felt infinite. Summers stretched long and wide, school years were milestones marked by the height chart on the wall, and the dog who basked in the sun at our front door felt like she’d be there forever.
Her name was Ellie. She came into my families life when everything still felt permanent, before I knew what it meant for something to end. She was there for my angsty teen years, every tear I cried into her fur, every excited return from college or when I moved cross country to Colorado. She was the constant, even when I wasn’t.
But time moves differently now. It doesn’t sprawl the way it did when I was fifteen. It sprints. It collapses. It folds itself in strange ways. One day, Ellie was pulling at the leash to walk just a bit longer; the next, she was slowing down, her walks shorter, her naps longer. I can still see the way her face turned gray, the way her body betrayed her, the way I wanted so badly to stop the clock.
Losing her this week has made me realize that dogs mark our lives not in years, but in eras. Ellie wasn’t just thirteen years old—she was my thirteen years old. The girl who adopted her doesn’t exist anymore. Neither does the version of me who left for college, or who thought heartbreak was the end of the world. I’ve shed those skins over and over, but she stayed, quietly bridging all those versions together.
There’s something almost sacred about the way dogs anchor us to time. They’re living, breathing reminders that love doesn’t freeze, it evolves, it ages, it lets go. Watching Ellie’s life run its course feels like watching the passage of my own youth, distilled into fur and heartbeat.
It hurts, but it also feels right. Because love and loss are proof that we lived fully in a moment worth grieving. That’s what time really is: not a countdown, but a collection of memories that made it impossible to imagine life any other way.
So today, as I sit in the quiet and feel the absence of her, I realize something: the ache in my chest is just time reminding me that it’s still moving. That I am too.
