The APUSH exam is in 16 days, and I’ve managed to complete exactly one solitary unit—out of nine, may I add.
My nights are vague, half-lit memories that are already slipping away into the static of everything else I was supposed to remember. In this ecosystem of chaos—conquistadors and colonists, revolutions and reformers—what feels like everything sits untouched, still buried in the pages of a textbook that feels more like an undissolvable burden than a guide. My mind is cluttered with too many dates, too many acronyms, and too many desperate attempts to connect the dots between a million different types of “-isms.”
My Google Documents are drowning under the weight of my futile studies—the Containment Doctrine and the Red Scare, railroad magnates and the Cross of Gold, the Democratic National Convention of 1896 and a thousand lyrics of Hamilton that remain my only source of constant, obtainable knowledge in a void of 500 years of history. I can only hope that, by the time the dreaded May 9 exam comes around, my time at the altar of panic and desperation will come to fruition as I finally grasp the concept of inflation verbatim. One can dream.
When my dual practices adjourn at the end of the evening and I return to what feels like an eternity of work, I have found myself craving only for my room to be cleaned by a spirit of time that I have never been familiar with. Perhaps if I could contort the 24th hour of the day and prevent its march forward into the night, then I would finally be able to step onto a carpet that does not hum with the cataclysm of wrappers and clothes and papers and whatever else lies in my suffocating alcove of thoughts.
I remind myself that this mess is buried amidst the ambition and motivation that, in two months, I will be rewarded with double the sleep I currently receive, not a mention of Manifest Destiny and not a singular glance at my McGraw-Hill Textbook for as long as I live.
Time runs through my fingers like water; everything—my hopes, dreams, and obligations—is soluble in it, diminishing and delayed. I attempt to compensate, to my fated teeming futility, by consuming myself with the concept of gaining more time, cutting corners, and extrapolating the hollow feeling of pride without any guaranteed reward. It is a hurricane with no eye; I simply wait for it to be over in hopes that my toil will not be irreparable or inapparent.
In the entropy, I comfort myself with the idea that this blind conviction is a step forward.
Its endless facets will be gone one day, and I will be exemplary once more—even if only for a small transience—until the next race begins again.
