Well, it's 8:50 a.m. The sun is up and shining right down on my face. To my own horror and incredulity, I have just woken up. I am standing upright in my bedroom, clutching my cell phone in one hand, rubbing my tired eyes with the other, with a sinking feeling in my stomach as I realize that I have missed my first class of the day. It can’t be 8:50, I think to myself. Just moments ago, as I crawled exhausted into the embrace of my warm bed, it was 12:00. I set my alarm. How did I manage to miss it? What happened to the time in between?

I am dysphoric, and not because this is the first time that this has happened to me. I feel this way because this is the first time in college that time has escaped my grasp. In high school I was master of the clock. I prided myself in my ability to complete an hour-and-a-half-commute in 45 minutes. I was known for my quick stride and innate knowledge of all of the bus schedules. I thought nothing of running across the Boston Common to make the bus in three minutes or jogging alongside my afternoon train as it rolled into the station. In classes, too, everything for me seemed to come together at the last possible minute. I aced tests that I crammed for the very same morning and made my mock trial presentations up on the go. I could get dressed in two minutes and eat breakfast in one. When I think back to my high school days, I sometimes wonder if I did anything slowly. Perhaps it was the adrenaline rush that I was after, the possibility of danger and despair, or maybe it was my way to cope with the stress of the uncertain future which loomed before me.

I don’t miss high school mornings because for the majority of my experience, I was tired and miserable. I could not be my complete self because more often than not, I had not slept enough to function properly. Fatigue was my ever-present guide, the limiting reagent in the chemical equation of high school success. A typical day would follow like this: at 5:00 a.m., my first phone alarm would go off. By and large, I ignored it. The only purpose of this first alarm was to award myself the pleasure of getting those last few minutes of precious sleep. 5:10: I sometimes missed this alarm. 5:15: I definitely heard it by now, and it agitated me, nonetheless, I was in no way to get out of bed. 5:25: there was no missing this alarm or else I’d be in trouble. With my final wake up call, I grudgingly dragged my feet out of bed and into the upcoming day. At 5:35 was my emergency backup alarm, but it didn’t really come in handy at the times I needed it most.

I hated mornings mostly because of the dark. I dreaded the pervading, inescapable darkness that I woke to every morning. Was it 1:00 am? Was is 4:30? In the dark, you couldn’t tell. In the dark I ate breakfast, brushed my teeth, and got dressed, careful not to wake my sleeping family members. At 6:01 I waited at the station as the train full of sleepy passengers rolled in. I’d find a seat by myself and attempt, in vain, to catch some last moments of sleep. In mornings like these, time seemed to slip away like sand through an open palm. At 6:35 my fatigue was replaced by a sort of false brazen energy as I strode past the crowds into North Station. I had ten minutes to purchase and consume breakfast at Dunkin’ Donuts, and then it was off to the subway for the remainder of my commute. I had to be in Beacon Hill by 7:10, which left me a reasonable window of time as I wandered through the train stations of Boston. And then the ordeal of school began. In the next twelve hours, I was laden with more work than I could imagine, only to go to bed at night and do it all over again. I found myself feeling that there were not enough hours in the day.

Throughout all four years of high school, I always “made it:” there was never a morning where I watched the bus pull away for me, or had to hail a taxi in despair. I thought I had time firmly within my grasp: I could bend it or manipulate it, waste it or make it stall. But then time got the upper hand, and my domain switched from the city to the college campus. It was a whole new world, and the rules here were different.

This morning, the clock informed me that I missed my alarm. That was hours ago. I was upset, doubtful, and in disbelief, but time went on. And that is the thing about time: it just goes, whether you like it or not.