Pain does strange things to time, but inactivity does worse. When your hand is broken and your movement is restricted, the world shrinks to a bed, a couch, and a screen that obeys every command with a single click. Everything is available instantly. News. Memories. People you haven’t spoken to in years. Old photographs. Conversations you had once buried under “busy.” With nothing demanding your body, your mind starts wandering without supervision.

The past, oddly, does not arrive clearly. It comes in patches. Comfortable, distant, like a room you once lived in but cannot fully picture anymore. You know it was yours, you know you were safe there, but the details refuse to line up. That haziness is unsettling. For a brief moment, you wonder if something is wrong with you. If memory is slipping. If this is how dementia begins. Then you realise it is not memory failing. It is life moving forward so organically that it quietly overwrote earlier versions of you.

We expect the past to be sharp, like a photograph preserved in a frame. But it behaves more like a file that keeps saving over itself. Relationships changed. Priorities shifted. Responsibilities grew without announcement. One day you were free, another day you were needed, and somewhere in between you stopped noticing the transition. Now, lying still, you try to trace yourself backwards and find only fragments. Not because they are gone, but because they are no longer relevant to who you had to become.

This forced stillness exposes an uncomfortable truth. Life does not pause for reflection. Reflection happens only when life injures you enough to make you stop. Until then, everything feels continuous. Logical. Purposeful. But when motion halts, you see the direction clearly. There is no loop, no rewind, no alternate route. Everything is playing out in one direction only. Forward. Quietly. Relentlessly. Towards the end of it all.

The thought is not dramatic. It is factual. And strangely, it is not frightening either. It is sobering. You realise that the comfort you associate with the past was never about the time itself. It was about fewer decisions, fewer consequences, fewer people depending on you. Comfort was not happiness. It was lightness. And lightness rarely survives adulthood.

With a broken hand, you do not just lose function. You lose distraction. Without constant movement, you are forced to sit with thoughts you usually outrun. The screen offers endless scrolling, but even that becomes background noise. What remains is a quiet understanding that life is not meant to be fully remembered. It is meant to be lived, altered, and left behind in layers.

This is not nostalgia. It is not regret. It is simply awareness. The kind that arrives when you are still long enough to notice that time has not slowed down with you. It keeps moving, gently, indifferently, carrying everything forward. Including you.

Good Night.