Ticking Bye Bye

      Your eyes are heavy, the day is young…. quickly growing old. With just one lamp standing at attention beside my bed, I write. Natural light spills through the cheaply constructed shades that cost a Chinese girl her life dedicated to work and mine to an apartment.

Sometimes I feel like a have a sixth sense.

            Maybe you have it too. And, no, I do not see dead people. If you see dead people, you should seek help immediately. My sixth sense is the feeling of time. Some evenings I sit in my cheap apartment, with thin walls, aware of it all. Aware of the students bundled three floors below, shuffling back and forth. Music entertains them through various headphones. The bolts and screws of Budweiser trucks scream beside the dumpster as it slows to a stop. Men wheel case after case into the liquor library.  I hear the sound of time running out. A tow truck pulls up and removes a vehicle from its convenient parking spot. Knocks on the front door. A young man comes through to check the vents. A microwave hum tells me my roommate is home.  My eyes are still heavy.

            You have got to realize that IF you nap, your room will still be a mess when you awake. Your homework will still be unfinished. Your bills, my dear, they are still unpaid. If you take this moment to sit down and write, all of these will still be unfinished. Your eyes will remain heavy. Time is disabling my hands from writing. It’s crushing my devotion to the Living One. Is this time, right in this moment, truly a waste? What if nobody every see’s this. “Ticking Bye Bye” could but only collect cyber dust in a folder named Emilee’s Written 2. What a great dust collector I have created. Ever since this sixth sense arrived, I have felt differently. These are the things I truly enjoy. I do not enjoy cleaning up messes, signing agreements to pay large sums of money, or getting kissed by the snowflake villain.

            When I write, my soul clicks “refresh”. Listening to the product of what others enjoy while attempting my own. Ideas flow through my mind, down my arms and through my fingertips. Hitting button, after button. Hitting them faster when ideas surge and slower when they require more processing. Simple. My sixth sense is stimulated in a new form. No longer can I worry about the tarnished memories yet to be made. The one light in my room keeps a cozy focus. In this Tetris culture, I wonder how I will fit. The things most uncontrollable string me with fear. My shoulders become tense, my breathing is restricted and my eyebrows take strikes at early aging. So I turn on the one lamp and write. Surely this time of refreshment will count towards something. How wonderful that day will be when I realize its importance. Until then, I will keep this moment sacred and sweet.