Due Tuesday, 11:59 PM

Sense. Heightened sense. Sense of finger and brow, brow filled with sweat, every drop
felt. Sense of keyboard and finger, interacting, rushed-past typos unremarkably underlined in
dotted red squiggles, sense of words spelled incorrectly, by the fingers, human and unreliable,
sense of punctuation and keystrokes and the backspace key. Sight is also a sense, painful and
weary, LED-strained, digital-blue and bloodshot red. Sense of surrounding, discarded coffee
cups, disorganized annotations, sense of roommate, sense of irritated roommate, tossing and
turning at the sound of the keyboard. Keyboard and window fan, one clattering and one
humming, punctuated with fast-paced sighs and pfft’s, sound, sound’s reverberation, its presence
sensed.
Stress. Mind-ache. Weariness physical and nonphysical. Also pain. Pain in the hands.
Another sense. Pain of mind, implacable but present regardless. Quick thinking and processing.
Nonlinear thoughts. Tangents and offshoots to be ignored, a task upon which to focus. Focus.
Energy-sapping scrutiny. Squinting and brow-furrowing, mouth slightly open, neck craned
forward. Awareness and worry. Hypotheticals to be discarded. Unhelpful thoughts of failure,
unbidden thoughts of crying parents and dirty alleyways and cramped apartments and poverty
and drug addiction. Failure. The distraction. To be brushed away, all to be brushed away, except
the screen: white, pristine, multi-tabbed. Pages of research and bookmarks, a paused music
stream, each tab serving as an aid or distraction to the Work. Thoughts. Relevant thoughts.
Organization, structure, order, on the screen, in commas and periods, in introductory phrases and
parenthetical citations, for the Work. The Task At Hand.
Articulation. Argumentation. Supplementation. Formation. Explanation. Citation.
Creation. Inspiration. Denotation. Propagation. Exploration. Rabid hyphenation. Declamation.
Justification. But mostly bullshit.
Fluttering eyelids. Caffeine twitches. The sensation of sweating internally. Heat. Body
heat, produced and felt, sensed, inescapable, even with the fan, the humming fan. The fan. A
distraction. Frantic discursivity. Long-shot unification. Half-remembered methods thrown at the
cursor. The cursor. Blinking. Slow. Mocking. A reminder of the reality. A reminder of the
Situation. A reminder of the hypotheticals, of distraction. A reminder of time.
Time. Inescapable. Insufferable. Impossibly precious resource, slipping through
metaphorical hands. The mortality of Time. A reminder of death. A reminder that all previous
conceptions of Time, conceptions wherein time was bountiful or slow-moving, were wrong.
Emphatically wrong. Time the master. Time as the only concept in the universe. The universe as
Time. The world a clock. Unstoppable. Ticking. Marching. Dead-eyed and merciless, sadistic
and blurry, inconceivable and tangible. A blinking bottom right-hand display of numbers,
piercing and consuming.
A brief summation. A glance at errors. The resolution of misplaced semicolons and
periods. The proper insertion of capitals and corrected spelling. The ‘ctrl’ key and the ‘c’ key a
phalangeal acrobatic. The search for the Final Tab. The ‘ctrl’ key and ‘v’ key. Uncertainty.
Resignation. Conviction. Submission.
Relief. Escape. The dissolution of time. For now.