Olivia Strauss Is Running Out of Time

by Angela Brown

“Well, I think Joyce is suggesting the irony of our relationship with death,” I said flatly. “Good, Olivia,” Sebastian said, like I was a child in need of praise. “Tell us more.” I glanced at the passage. Unlike in college, the whole thing came into focus like a developing photograph. “Well, when we’re young, we live more authentically. But as we get older and become closer to our deaths, our perception changes. We live in a more fearful state.” I felt everyone staring at me. “It’s ironic because it’s when we’re older—when we’re approaching death and running out of time to live—that we should embrace life. However, most of us do the opposite.”

It felt like only days earlier that we’d sat across from each other, our mouths full of briny anchovies, in that tucked-away Italian spot downtown. But it wasn’t days earlier. It was years. A lot of them. “Wait.” Time, I was learning, was a thief.

I set the vase on our island now and looked around. Our house was a perpetual disaster. Piles of paperwork. Toys everywhere. I stepped back. Those flowers felt like a quiet burst of beauty among the chaos. They don’t last long. I didn’t want things to feel so chaotic anymore.

One by one, all those voices around me—the ones that definitively knew they would be gone from this earth in weeks or months—described the things they wanted most from their final days. Their answers were different and yet the same. They wanted time. To make good on old grudges. To relive their favorite days. To laugh. To love. Not one of them spoke about uprooting her whole life, of starting over or tearing down walls or chasing old professional ambitions or turning everything in her world on its head. Rather, every woman’s dying wish was to simply spend her final days—however many of them she had left—being able to exist in the simple quietness of her life. To have more time to enjoy and appreciate the beauty in that.

“Today has felt impossibly long,” I said. But that wasn’t really what I meant. What I meant was that some days—like this one—life felt impossibly brief. You blinked and it was over. It was a blip. A drop. Before you’d even had a chance to figure out the purpose of the plot, the closing credits were already on the screen.

For too many years, I’d taken for granted so many aspects of my life while on a quest to check off the few boxes I’d yet to complete. It was like that scattering of blank squares had left a blankness in me. It wasn’t until I began to chase them down that I realized that I could still have a full life, even if they remained empty. That I could be content, yet still have dreams.

There is no such thing as a perfect life. There are only perfect moments.