Time is the steady drip of water filling up a bowl. It’s slow and boring and frustrating, and you can’t stand how long it’s taking. But one day, you look down into the bowl, and it’s already filled halfway to the brim, and for the life of you, you can’t remember how it got that way. 

My life is, for the most part, boring.

I have realized recently that despite my greatest efforts, I am constantly exhausted by the repetition of days.

I think the sun must be too. I think that after endless trips around the earth, perpetually suspended above humanity, the sun has finally become too drained to shine through the clouds every day, and that’s why it’s always so dreary out.

All things considered, the fact that I am constantly bored is a contradiction. I’m bored, but I have so much to do that I continuously feel overworked and stressed. I’m bored, but there are a thousand other things I wish I could be doing if I didn’t have to finish my homework. 

Life is boring.

And I hate falling into the endless trap of it. 

Somedays, I feel stuck in a “groundhog day” time loop. Except that, while the same thing happens to me day after day after day, time passes with it. 

I stare at the clock at 1:32 pm, Monday afternoon, and then again at 1:32, Wednesday afternoon, and even though forty-eight hours have passed, I’m still sitting, half asleep, in my science class, and nothing has changed. 

I have accomplished nothing new. I haven’t learned anything that I didn’t know two days before, and I’m afraid that three years from now, it’ll be 1:32 pm on the day of my graduation and I won’t remember anything about the past four years that I should care about.

I’m closer to graduating high school than to fifth grade. In fifth grade, someone told me that I was part of the class of 2026, and it seemed impossible. In 2018, I was sure that I would never make it to senior year. 

My teacher joked about things that would happen in sixth grade, and it was like I couldn’t even comprehend the fact that I would be a sixth grader someday. It’s been three years since then. 

I talk sometimes about how it feels like I lost part of my life during Covid. Like I missed years that would have been crucial to me otherwise, but I’ve begun to realize that Covid has nothing to do with the passing of my childhood years. 

People talk about how time passes slowly when you want to move fast, or fast when you wish it would slow down for just one second, but I think it’s more than that. 

Time is slow in the moment. For the 48 hours between my science classes on Monday and Wednesday, I’m bored out of my mind. I can’t think of anything to do, but I still have weeks of piled-up homework. 

But soon, I’ll be a senior, and I won’t remember most of what happened during high school because ‘the time went by too quickly.’

Except it didn’t. Except I think I’m going to spend my entire four years of high school waiting to graduate, and it’ll take forever. 

You spend so much time wishing for the water to flow faster that you have no memory of watching the bowl fill up, and now, it’s too late.

I’m afraid of that happening to me. 

Too often, I find myself peering into the bowl and being shocked at how full it already is. And too often, I find myself staring at the endless drip of water, wishing it would just move faster.