মুহূর্ত
(Muhūrta-The Fleeting Moment)

I wake up screaming.

The sound is small, fragile: a child’s cry trapped in a throat that sometimes belongs to an old man. My hands clutch a pen mid-sentence, knuckles white as bone. The words sprawl like wounded birds across the page: When I Grow Up. The letters stagger, drunk on innocence, each loop of the “p” collapsing like a failed rocket. A story about a boy who wanted to touch the stars. 

I don’t remember writing it.

Because yesterday, I was seventy, watching the sunset from a hospital bed, the morphine drip singing lies about permanence. This is the end, I thought, as nurses adjusted my tubes.

 But endings are luxuries for linear creatures. 

The day before, I was twenty-five, running barefoot through the rain, my lover’s name dissolving on my tongue like a sugar cube. Today, I am seven. Or maybe I am no one. A question mark wearing skin.

It started with a pop. Not a sound, but a feeling—like the universe snapping its fingers, like reality sighing as it let go. One moment, life was a straight line, predictable and orderly. The next, it was a shattered mirror, shards of time reflecting fragments of lives we could no longer hold onto.

Scientists called it Temporal Collapse. Philosophers called it The Unraveling.

We called it hell.

People slipped between ages like ink bleeding through paper. A soldier on the battlefield could blink and become a toddler clutching his mother’s hand. A woman could live an entire lifetime, only to wake up in a crib, staring up at a mobile of stars. Some were lucky, cycling through life like chapters in a book. Others were stuck, waking up every morning to the same childhood, the same wrinkles, the same decay. I met a man who’d relived his daughter’s funeral fourteen times. Each morning, he’d claw at his wrists, trying to bleed out before the clock reset.

The world didn’t end. It just… rearranged. 

Playgrounds echoed with elders sobbing for lost pensions, their dementia-stricken minds convinced they were late for meetings. Maternity wards filled with infants bearing old souls’ frowns. 

Cities cracked open like eggs, spilling people of all ages into streets they no longer recognized. Parents lost their children to time, children lost their parents to the past. Hospitals overflowed with patients who couldn’t be treated because their bodies changed faster than medicine could adapt. Schools became revolving doors of ages, switching between calculus and the alphabet depending on who walked through the door.

The first weeks were chaos. I remember seeing a man drop to his knees in the middle of the street, his face buried in shaking hands, whispering, “I was supposed to get married today”. I saw a girl no older than ten, wandering alone, clutching a wedding ring in her tiny palm, her face blank, hollow. 

I wanted to tell her it was going to be okay, that maybe she'd wake up old enough to understand it tomorrow—but I didn’t lie to children.

 Not anymore.

Some people tried to hold onto the past, scribbling desperate notes on their arms in case they woke up someone else tomorrow. Their skin became a manuscript of erased lives: grocery lists overwritten with suicide notes, phone numbers dissolving into nursery rhymes. Others stood at the edges of rooftops, staring down at a world that no longer made sense. It was strange, watching people age backward, seeing their suffering rewound—replayed in different bodies, different times. No one escaped grief. They just circled it, orbiting around the same pain in new skins.

We tried to survive.

Then came the taxes.

Governments, desperate for control, introduced Chronological Contributions. If you woke up in your prime—strong, capable, profitable—you paid. The logic was cruelly simple: when you cycled through prosperity, you owed a debt to those trapped in childhood or old age.

It sounded fair.

It wasn’t.

The rich cheated the system, paying time brokers to stabilize their years, trapping themselves in endless primes.  They hosted dinner parties where champagne never went flat, their laughter frozen at just the right frequency: not too youthful, not too frail. The rest of us were at the mercy of the roulette wheel. A doctor might wake up as a toddler before ever stepping into an operating room. A child might blink and become an old man, with nothing to show for the life he never got to live.

A new class system emerged—not based on wealth, but on when.

There were the Anchored—those who could pay to remain in their thirties and forties, eternally useful, eternally untaxed. And then there were the Drifters, the ones who woke up as ghosts of themselves, who never knew if today they would be strong, weak, alive. Some people, the Lost Ones, simply stopped trying. You’d see them wandering the streets, their eyes distant, waiting for the next leap to take them somewhere, anywhere, else. They stopped speaking in futures, only in fractured pasts. I think I was a teacher once. Maybe a father. Maybe neither.

I’m writing this as a 30-year-old, in a rented room in the 30s district. My neighbor was 16 yesterday, 50 today. We swap stories over cheap coffee, trying to make sense of a world that refuses to be understood. But I know it won’t last. Tomorrow, I could be anything.

Or nothing.

I have memories that don’t belong to me. I remember my mother’s lullabies, but I also remember the way my wife smiled on our wedding day, even though I don’t know if I ever had a wife. I remember standing at a podium, receiving a diploma, yet I have no proof I ever attended school. My past is a puzzle with missing pieces, my future an empty canvas that paints itself in real time.

Sometimes, I stare at my reflection and wonder—who am I, really? The face in the mirror is a stranger, and yet I have worn it before. I trace the curve of my jaw, the slope of my nose, and try to recall if this is who I was meant to be. But it is impossible to have an identity when it keeps shifting beneath my fingertips, crumbling like sand.

Some tried to resist. The Clepsydra—a cult of physicists and poets—believed time shattered when humanity stopped dreaming forward. “We traded wonder for widgets,” their graffiti reads, spray-painted on the ruins of observatories. They work in abandoned subway tunnels now, carving equations into concrete with rusted scalpels. I followed one once—a woman with Einstein’s equations tattooed across her eyelids. She’d built a machine from salvaged MRI parts and childhood teeth, convinced she could reverse the Collapse by aligning every possible version of herself. “The answer ’s in the overlap,” she hissed, her hands flickering between ages 12 and 97. But when she threw the switch, the machine spat out only a child’s crayon drawing: a stick-figure astronaut falling through a cracked sky.

The Clepsydras say time broke when we stopped looking up. When we traded constellations for spreadsheets, miracles for algorithms. They whisper of a fix—a grand equation that could mend the fracture. But I’ve seen their chalkboard cathedrals. The numbers always end the same: ERROR. DIVIDE BY ZERO. INFINITY UNDEFINED. 

I haven’t seen them around lately. Some say they were captured, others say they disappeared mid-sentence, time erasing them before they could finish their work.

But maybe they were never real to begin with.

I met a woman once—a painter who tried to capture the way time folded over itself. She painted the same portrait over and over, layering faces of different ages on top of each other. A baby’s round cheeks, a teenager’s defiant glare, an old man’s weary eyes. When I asked who it was, she only smiled. “Watch,” she said. The paint began to drip—the child crying black tears, the old man’s eyes melting into the teenager’s scowl. By morning, the canvas was blank again.

I wonder if she’s still painting. I wonder if she remembers me.

I dream sometimes. Of being still. Of waking up the same person two days in a row. I dream of falling asleep knowing who I will be tomorrow, of making a promise and keeping it. Last night, I dreamt of holding a funeral for all my selves—lined up tiny coffins labeled Age 7, Age 25, Age 70. But when I tried to bury them, the graves kept reopening.

I press my hand against the paper as if holding something fragile, something that could slip away. The ink smears, like time itself bleeding through the pages. I clutch the notebook tighter as if anchoring myself to this moment, this version of me.

I stare down at the unfinished words of my childhood, the ones I don’t remember writing.

When I Grow Up.

I don’t know if I ever did.

Time doesn’t flow anymore. It spirals. It loops. It folds.

And the ink keeps running.