Five Minutes to Midnight

11:55 p.m. screams of deadlines.  Of all the things I did not do today.  Of grossly unedited reviews of British news magazines crammed in just under the deadline.  Of all the reasons I am awake and huddled frigidly over my keyboard instead of curled up under my heavy warm blankets with the pictures of horses on them.

I despise that moment, when I let fly an offhanded glance at the clock (oh, the unintended puns in that half a sentence; pardon me as I take this parenthetical statement to cringe in agony) and realize the planet is about to tick past another hour in its millennia-old orbit, that my laptop header is about to sway from "Wed Nov 10" to "Thu Nov 11" and there is so much I could have gotten done, and didn't, and now I've lost two hours of sleep and six hours of potential productivity and now tomorrow will be less productive because my unfinished work from today will spill over into tomorrow like Digory and Polly spilled over into Charn and dragged the future White Witch all over the universe. What have I lost but yet another bubble of my fragile, ever-dwindling time?  What have I lost but all the lusted-for perfection that would make me as inhuman as the vampires I hate so much in contemporary teen fiction?  What have I lost but sleep and stress and the remedy to loneliness?  11:55 p.m. is the loneliest minute in all of the slightly-more-than-eighteen-and-a-half-year-old history of Kiersten.  At 11:55 p.m. all my daily dreams slip into the untested time stream of tomorrow's would-be-should-be-could-be moments, yet to be tasted.  And I trudge through the gooey tangled forest of the "must-be-done-now!" homework, and debate whether to wade through the river of "should-be-done-extremely-soon!" homework, and try to run through Jell-O away from the looming black thunderheads of "should-be-thought-about!" homework.  And then I do a couple of push-ups, consider writing down the spilled-over list of things to be done, poke holes in my consciousness with a melatonin, and go skydiving into a sleep fraught with more subconscious promises about tomorrow.