Burning textbooks
Counting the ticking of the clock is like counting the breaths that are markers of life on earth. How many ticks before the clock breaks down? How many breaths before life ends? In and out, transforming oxygen to carbon dioxide in the constant cycle marked by the hands going round and round. Hands are constantly busy because no one wants to waste precious time, yet life is sometimes wasted through constant business. People have always wished for extra hours to increase their twenty four, so they invented daylight savings time to travel in time an hour each day. Yet borrowed time must always be returned, so imposing deadlines always loom. If I broke every clock in sight would chaos ensue or would I perhaps feel at peace as the deadlines slipped away and the sun and moon resumed their natural rhythms? I want to feel free of deadlines and dates with midnight for the sake of homework and responsibility, though perhaps that is only laziness expressed in a more poetic form, mixed with the desire to travel back in time to childhood years. My desire for the heaviness to dissipate is maybe just the desire to return to a lighter state; to a time when I was half this weight and could look up to most people from a place much closer to the ground. Gravity seemed to pull on me less when I remained closer to the earth. I loved it when my mind traveled far from earth to chase stars in the sky. The gravity has made me feel too weighted down to drift at present and the ticking of clocks tend to pound in my head. It’s not that I am breaking down, though that is the natural way of things…It’s more that in some ways I want to be able to let go and break down completely because then the weight would disappear. Maybe I don’t really want to break down; rather, I want to be able to let go of the trivial things in life that I have deemed important (like grades!) in order to make peace with my current elevation. The clock now reads 7:47pm and I know that the gears are shifting with each letter I type. Sadly, if I ever did smash all the clocks and return to a less complicated state, then people would probably think that I had lost my mind, rather than released it from its cage. “Life can be so wonderful” is what so many say, and I truly do believe them. I want to be able to experience life in that way, but the ticking is giving me a headache. I want the African drums to stop pounding in my head, enabling me to think more clearly. My fear is that I will make an impulsive decision, which seems to be my way, and then have no way of fixing things later. When grades fall it is so much harder to bring them back up again, and colleges might not appreciate the anti-grade experiment. My Pre-Calculus homework is weighing on my mind and this typing is a form of procrastination. I hate pre-calculus. Perhaps the reason for my dislike stems from my lack of understanding, which is perplexing in itself since I grasped the concepts the first time around. You’d think that after a half a year of Calculus my digression would make for an easy class. Could the explanation be that my brain cells are being deprived of oxygen within this cage, or is that simply another way of displacing blame? At times like this, pre-calculus homework seems so pointless, like a waste of needed energy. And now I’m doubting everything from whether I want to continue on this path toward insanity and good grades in order to apply to colleges where the same struggles will exist, or should I (and could I) truly just let go right now and follow a different way. Perhaps each year people should just “wake me up when September ends” because this year’s questions are just last year’s repeated. And maybe it is time to finally diverge…