<p>Crises are not all sudden and spectacular – some are incremental and manifest in unlikely places. We explore how one person’s experience and imagination of the climate crisis developed across 24 years of online diary writing. This longitudinal analysis captures the subtle shifts in people’s experience close to real time, allowing us to theorise when and how the climate crisis is manifested, felt, and imagined. We move beyond the common definition of crisis as an exceptional disruption in time, recognising that it can also be a slow and elusive process, and instead ask which events bring the climate crisis to the forefront of people’s experience. The analysis highlights three periods with imaginative transformations, detailing a temporal realignment and gradual differentiation. Moving from a distant cloud on the horizon into the present, the diarist’s imagination increasingly gains concrete and apocalyptic form. In tandem, we trace fluctuations in eco-emotions to challenge static and linear categorisations, suggesting that the dichotomy between indirect and direct manifestations is intimately entangled through time and scaffold the imagination. Our research attempts to provide a dynamic and contextually sensitive approach to study and understand how the climate crisis is experienced and imagined over time.</p>