A MORNING THAT CAME BEFORE LAST NIGHT’S CAFFEINE HAD WORN OFF BY EVAN VOLBRECHT

I closed my eyes, and it seemed as if an eternity passed, stories and worlds passing like a fever dream in my semi-subconscious, but when I again opened them all those years later only a few minutes had transpired. My body felt wonderfully fit yet terribly wrong; I trembled at the touch of the still, silent morning. I fled from it, that shaky realness that would accompany my rising. Instead I again shut my eyes and turned my thoughts to that which lay ahead of me, the challenges of this new day’s particularly busy schedule, but found myself unable to comprehend its portent and immediacy, as the buzz my body had felt relocated to the inside of my head. I lived in this time as a mayfly, eras of my life unfolding as minutes on a Wednesday morning. The crashing noise and sound of the classrooms, lurking behind a twist of time no more than an hour hence, might very well have been my deathbed for all that I would experience in but a few minutes here, lying in my bed, feeling the silent dawn burn a slow line up the side of my face.

It hardly seemed possible, for all that would transpire that day to have fit within its confines without overflowing into the others, so perhaps this was why the hourglasses trickled far past the span their name suggested. Or perhaps it was a week going under a false name, a week whose favored protagonist changed as their day expired and another began. The lifetimes that passed couldn’t all be mine; they must have belonged to anyone desiring to take my shivering self for a spin, and see what was possible, as they wove together such different lives into a tiny tapestry, with clever twists of fabric I could not understand, disguising the sudden gulf of change in what I considered my daily experience.

Lights flicked on. My alarm shook and rang and my body resonated in response, as my veins ran like live wires and jerked my body into sudden and jarring motion. Blood thundered in my temples and squeezed my vision until I could see only the immediate, and the vastness of time shrank away to nothing. The ripcord my movement tugged in turn pulled my mind puttering into action, alerting me of my impending duties assiduously, if not as loudly as my stomach soon did. To my mayfly life it would be, then; even eternities have beginnings and ends.