I’ve stared at more clocks than I’d like to admit. Especially the slow, blood-red digits of
the World History classroom one; burning minutes into my brain while the Cold War sits ignored
on the IFP.
There’s something about a classroom clock that transforms time into an entirely different
dimension. I can almost hear it ticking when I’m desperately anticipating the bell. The minute
numbers crawl forward so slowly, as if the clock knows I’m watching it. I’ve sat through so
many classes where I’ve had to break time into smaller pieces, just to get through each period.
One hour left? The last ten barely count anyway. That’s two twenty-five-minute chunks. And
each of those chunks breaks down into five five-minute segments. And five minutes? I can
survive for five minutes.
It’s how I try to trick my brain into thinking the day is moving faster. Break it down.
Make it smaller. Pretend the seconds aren’t dragging. But no matter how I divide it, those boring
stretches always feel endless. Like they have weight. Like they take up more space in reality than
they should. The boredom seems to press against my chest, making each breath in the stuffy
classroom feel heavier.
Yet the minutes, steady as always, continue to pass. And eventually, the class ends. But
the weird thing about time: it’s not always slow. Sometimes, it’s too fast.
Like the moments in seventh grade, laughing in the back of history class, stomach aching.
When we were probably supposed to be watching a documentary, one of my friends whispered a
joke that made me laugh so hard that I had to bury my head in my hoodie. The teacher’s
suspicious glance only made us struggle not to laugh. The kind of moment where you forget

what time is. When I was fully present in that perfect slice of existence. When the bell’s harsh
ring seemed to come just minutes after class began, even though the whole period had vanished.
And now, looking back, I realize that those moments didn’t feel slow at all. They flew by. So
maybe time itself isn’t slow or fast. Maybe it’s just the way I experience it. The moments with
genuine laughter, random hallway conversations, or the rare group project wins—those flew by
with heartbreaking speed. And those are the parts I miss the most. Not the endless lessons I
counted my way through, but the ones I didn’t want to end.
There’s something deeply unfair about this imbalance. The unpredictable nature of how
time passes. Painfully slow when you want it to hurry. Cruelly fast when you want it to linger.
Never quite matching what I need it to be. I think this inconsistency is why I started trying to
control time. Breaking it into blocks. Trying to manage it like a schedule I could bend to my will.
But I can’t. None of us can. We don’t get to choose how fast time moves. We only get to choose
how we spend it.
So even though I can’t slow down the good parts, I can be more aware of them. I can live
in them completely. I can let myself laugh so hard in the middle of class that I forget about the
clock on the wall. I can stop trying to rush through the slow moments and maybe just accept
them as a necessary part of a complete life. Because the truth is, when I look back, it’s not the
length of the moment that matters. It’s what was inside it. It’s what happened within that
moment. The connections made. The insights discovered. The changes sparked.