Do you take time for granted? Or does it plague you with nightmares? Guest author Caitlin Purple shares the secret to a long, successful life.

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I hope one day I can reach a place where the sun shines and the wind blows and the earth spins slowly, giving me time to do everything I’ve always wanted. Time goes by faster and faster for me every day because the more time I think I have, the more I take it for granted and let it fly by without a backward glance.

When in reality I have barely any time at all.

Some days I sit in my dull room, watching the clock. Wooden, rotten, and smelling of musk; it lives in my bedroom.

The huge grandfather clock stands taller than my father, who is easily six feet with a few added inches from his thick, curly hair that he lets grow far too long. The clock ticks loud and obnoxious during the day, but I’m the heaviest sleeper in our family of four so at night I don’t hear a thing. That’s why I got stuck with it.

“Phoebe, this is a beautiful antique!” my mother told me when it was first moved into my room.

“An ugly piece of crap,” I had mumbled to her. But she hadn’t heard me

Tick, tock. Tick, tock.

The grandfather clock used to scare me as a child, its shadow looking like a tall man.

It gave me nightmares of being chased, the clock getting faster and faster as I ran but stopping dead in its tracks the second I looked behind. Yet whenever I blinked, it moved closer still. Eventually I learned the only way to defeat the clock was to never let it out of my sight. Even when my eyes burned from dryness.

I used to have a tilted lampshade, which filled the room with uneven light, half of my room aglow but the other half in ghostly shadows. And of course, the grandfather clock was always in the shadow.

The clock is still covered in shadows to me, despite my new lamp. But it can be just as scary as it ticks away my life.

Time is a crime, and clocks are the evidence. Every time I look at a clock I know I’ll never be able to live that moment again. Never again will I experience noon on December first 2014 or midnight of March second of 2015.

Time is a crime, and unless I catch it in the act of moving too fast, it’s bound to get away. If there were no clocks, time would cheat me again and again by getting faster and faster every day.

Tick, tock. Tick, tock.

And another day is dead. Until someone creates a time machine, yesterday is lost forever. Yesterday is locked in a vault somewhere deep underground. If I wanted to re-live or change yesterday, I’d have no way of doing so.

Every day time moves faster and faster, till one day it stops for someone forever. The knife comes down, and time stands still for people when their heart stops beating. They will never see tomorrow, not even the rest of today. The dead are frozen in time and locked away in that same vault deep underground. No matter how hard anyone tries, the vault of time cannot be opened.

Tick, tock. Tick, tock.

Another minute has passed, but this has not been a minute wasted like so many are every day. This past minute has been a minute of thoughts and ideas. Maybe even inspiration.

After I move out and leave the grandfather clock behind I’m going to start wearing a watch to keep my eye on time. Watch it to make sure it doesn’t go by too fast. Time is a crime, and unless I catch it in the act of going by too fast, I’ll have been robbed of my years left on this Earth.

Tick, tock. Tick, tock.

My secret to living a long, successful life: don’t waste your limited time.

And maybe consider buying a clock.

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Caitlin Purple has been a storyteller since her elementary school days and over time has developed a passion for creative writing. She first began pursuing creative writing as a career in middle school, when she posted a novella she had written on a young writer’s website. Her story received more than two thousand readers within a year. Her pen name, “Purple,” came from her father, who suggested it as a middle name for Caitlin before she was born.

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