Time of my Life

Six A.M. and my alarm goes off. Naturally, I reach over to snooze it for 5, 10, or 15 minutes. “Ah”, more sleep would certainly satisfy me, but if I don’t get up I won’t have time to shower before school, or eat breakfast and I have to print off my due assignments too...I must get up if I want time to breathe at all today. When I step outside to munch on my breakfast I reflect on the fence around my home. As I stand on my front porch and remain still I see no fences, no barriers cross my eyes. The obstructions are all hidden behind the woods I’ve yet to go through. For a moment my path is free and clear and the possibilities are endless. Reaching down, I strap on my converse, bright red, with worn out laces that are no longer white. I step down onto the grass. It is soft at first. I think of the irony that I am walking on “blades”. But they don’t hurt me; I am so much bigger than them. They are small obstructions that I step right over with little thought. I explore and walk and think, but I have to watch the clock. At a certain time I have to go somewhere. When I get inside I see an old friend on the wall. I like to call him Mr. Clock. He sounds nice doesn’t he? He sure looks nice, all shiny and black and in the shape of a fancy treble clef sign. As I enter my room he tells me that I have fifteen minutes to get ready. A friendly reminder for the most part but in reality Mr. Clock here runs my life. He is like an invisible emperor ruling me according to his fleeting and fickle whims. When I need one moment to be calm he seems to steal all of them away. When I want to move past something, or can’t wait to get to a special event, Mr. Clock slows down and drags his hands much too slow. Never does he move how I want him to move. I get angry with him at times and want to stick him in the closet. “I’ll show him,” I think, “he won’t even know what happened when I stick him in the dark.” Then I look at my watch or even my cell phone and there go the seconds, tick-tocking away. So I pull out Mr. Clock and put him back on his peg on the wall. We can find a way to exist together in the same room somehow, because no matter what I do, I can’t live outside of time. Even if Mr. Clock breaks I can’t not be affected by time and when I stop to think I realize that he is commanded by it as well. Poor little guy, he lives only to turn as time commands. As for my life, time restrictions cover every inch of it. When I stepped into the world of college I was sure I could handle the time crunches. Then I realized that time moves at its own will and the hours fly by when your to-do list just keeps growing. I expected to fly through courses but there seem to be pre-requisites for pre-requisites and they all require time. “I must pay my dues for a season” I think. In reality I never know when one season ends and another begins. The irony of it all is that I can’t wait for what is coming, but I’m living in one moment, and I always will be. What I wished for will soon be past as I’m caught up on time’s highway. Life wouldn’t exist without the boundaries of time. Even eternity is defined by time. I learn every day that you can’t go forward and you can’t go back. Each day, hour, minute, second is a fence around you. I can’t return to the days I sat near my grandma, weeks before she died, my time with her came and now it’s gone. I can’t slow the hand’s movements when my mom and I dissolve into laughter over our secret jokes, I can only hope a moment like that comes again. When my dad hugs me for minutes at a time all I can do is try to memorize it so I can make it last even longer. I can’t propel myself forward to the day I’ll have a family of my own, nor can I decide when my own personal clock will run out and the hands of time will keep moving on without me. Mr. Clock, that black shape always on my wall, is at once the greatest and most awful fence in my life. As the seconds tick by he keeps me from the past and always in the present. He keeps the past behind my back and the future dangling in front of me, both of them out of my power. He won’t let me take more than one moment at a time. The more I grow the more I realize that this is not simply meant to torture me, it is also a saving grace.