Time Capsule
Romi Vaturi
The world record for the longest breath held underwater is 24 minutes and 37.36 seconds. It was made on March 27, 2021, by Budimir Šobat from Croatia. Me, from New Jersey, I can manage a mere 1 minute and 2.18 seconds, but sometimes I feel like I’ve been holding my breath for my entire life. I keep words under my tongue like I’m waiting those 30 seconds for a tablet to dissolve into my bloodstream. Time is an incoming collision, and we are all birds on the side of the road, helpless to do anything but witness deer become roadkill just as we find the warning rise, acidic, in our throats. It takes 13 milliseconds for our eyes to process what we see, which doesn’t sound like much, except it means that once you’ve spotted the blood about to hit the pavement, it already has. Always late, always beginning to bleed into the past, never present. When I turned 13, my best friend gave me a time-turner—a necklace, an hourglass with what looked like real sand, a plastic replica of the time-traveling device in Harry Potter. We had read those books until the spines could crack open on their own, but my time-turner was not yet marked by time or care or use. Watching the grains of sand seep down, I felt time slipping through our fingers. I tried to keep track—the way you tuck away old baby teeth and shoes that have become too small and all the other firsts and lasts you eventually leave behind. I had one moment to pretend we were really going back in time (an hour each time I spun the wheels of the necklace). We were standing side-by-side, both next to each other now and the girls we used to be, emerging from beneath like butterflies from a chrysalis. But the sand reached the bottom, and I said nothing. We ate strawberry shortcake, dipping our fingers into the white cream to leave behind fingerprints like ancient fossils preserved for millennia in amber. I blew out the candles, shaped like a 1 and a 3, before the wax could drip onto the frosting, tap-tap-tap like a metronome. She grew up faster than me, but I still have the time-turner hanging on a nail on my bedroom wall. I never tell her. I don’t ask if she notices—too old for those sorts of things, I think (18 years is 567,648,000 seconds). And the longer you hold your breath, the more color bleeds from your lips. But I have photographs of us on my wall too, taped up near that time-turner—my 17th birthday, sitting together at the same dining room table with another strawberry shortcake, both smiling, a moment frozen in time forever. Printing the words neatly on a diary page or a laptop screen, I craft myself a time capsule. Old worksheets and pictures and birthday presents scattered like seeds in the wind. Every memory I have ever had exists all at once, holding on to time but letting it roam free. I move forward. When we talk on the phone, I listen to her voice, and a laugh bubbles out of me, the way your knee jerks when you bump it—instinctive, natural, without thought or time to doubt. Just this moment, enclosed in on itself. I let out a breath, let loose my tongue, exchange the parts of ourselves we’re too afraid to face in the light. Even when the moment passes, I think it stays hidden somewhere in me, hibernating, waiting to be remembered again, resurfacing, written about and held close. The closest the past can stay to the present.
Romi Vaturi, class of 2026, is from Jersey City, New Jersey. She plans to pursue a degree in Comparative Literature and a minor in Creative Writing. Outside of the classroom, Romi also enjoys reading, drawing, listening to music, and spending time with her two cats.
Romi wrote this piece in a creative writing class taught by Professor Alyea Pierce. Pierce selected the piece for publication in WHR.