I take honors chemistry. I take AP biology. Of course, both at the same time. How’s that going for me? Not as well as I’d expected it to be, but not as badly as I was told it was going to be. At the moment, I’m in pure chaotic calm. There’s a little too much work and I’m overwhelmed a little too much, but at the same time, if I have even a minute or two of free time, I feel like there isn’t enough. Not enough homework. Said no teenager ever.
Like I said, chaotic calm. Not enough calm. Not enough chaos.
So, we walk into chemistry sometime earlier this week, and on the board, there are various amounts of seconds, and what happened before those various amounts of seconds had passed. Vague and confusing description, I know. Basically, it said things like:
One million seconds ago: You were starting your first day of school.
One billion seconds ago: Your parents were probably your age.
Ok. So. A pretty broad spectrum of events. I feel like the second one is a conversation for another time. My parents? My age? I wonder if 13-year-old Aleksander (my dad) had a bowl-cut or something. My mom was probably 13 years old and already reading Anna Karenina or something (she’s like that).
No, what I want to focus on is the one in the middle. One million seconds ago from that class period, I was starting my first day of school? It feels like it’s been so long since then.
It’s only been two weeks. That’s not even that much. But it feels like a very long time. In that time, I managed to memorize my lunch schedule. Lunch schedules might have been the most concerning thing for me, going into the school, plunging into blind terror the minute someone asked me what lunch I had. What… lunch?
Though I’ve managed to memorize my lunch schedules, I am far from memorizing my class schedules. There’s always a spark of fear through my heart when a block ends, everyone starts getting up and I have no idea what my next class is. I’ve actually found it’s easier to figure out what my next class is through what my friends have, rather than actually remembering what I have. Our conversations often look like:
—
“What’s your next class?”
“Geometry.”
“Oh, I’m pretty sure that means I have VHS!”
“Why don’t you just… look at your own schedule?”
—
And, in the span of the past two weeks, I’ve also managed to lose my paper schedule copy. Once or twice (a day). I dig through my backpack for a few minutes before I grasp a folded little piece of paper with doodles and scribbles and almost illegible handwriting with my schedule on it.
I’ve managed to make some new friends. Because I talk to everyone, and when you talk to everyone, well, they usually talk back. And then, you know, when they talk back, you talk back some more. And before you know it, you’re friends. That’s just how it works.
My friends and I, we compare schedules. We compare lunches. We complain about homework. AP bio homework. Chem homework. English homework. All the commitments we can’t seem to even keep track of.
My friends and I, we walk to town and we go to the library and the bookstore and back in between. We go and we drink coffee from all the places that sell coffee, because we just have that much homework. My friends and I, we pass and wave and smile in the hallways and we audition for drama club and then we write for Veritas (check out Veritas! The Nantucket High School newspaper! I’m assistant-editor-in-chief!) and then we do it all over again.
It’s only been around a million seconds. Probably more, by now. Probably, like, a million-one. Can you tell I have little to no concept of time?
Yeah, it’s only been around a million seconds since I started school. And there’s still always going to be that weird, sticky, temperature change when I walk into the doors, because the air is never quite cold enough for what I’m wearing, or it’s too cold for what I’m wearing. There’s always going to be a little bit of confusion. A little bit of confusion is healthy.
A million seconds of shoving through the hallway and being hit by people’s swinging backpacks and hearing “pull up your mask” a million times in a million seconds in a million days. Homework that seems like it’ll take another billion seconds to finish.
Maybe, by the time I’m done figuring out what the heck standard deviation is, my kids will be the age I am right now. I hope that, by then, I have figured it out. I really, really hope so.
