I can barely keep my eyes open. It’s like I’m a junior in high school, trying my best to stay awake through a double period of chemistry. That was probably the toughest part about adolescence, just staying awake. Every once in a while I’ll read something in the newspaper about how all of these studies show that we shouldn’t be making teenagers get up at six in the morning. That was me exactly.

There was no way I ever went to bed before midnight. It just wasn’t happening. I was too hyper, and there were too many things to do, watching TV, doing my homework, OK, whatever, I guess I didn’t have a lot going on. But it didn’t matter. Sometimes I would just sit there in my bedroom, bored out of my mind, but not willing to call it a night just yet.

And then the next thing I knew, my mom would be yelling at me to wake up. Getting out of bed when you really, desperately want to still be asleep, it’s probably one of the worst feelings a human being can experience. Maybe that’s a little dramatic. But if it’s not the worst, it’s definitely one of the worst.

Finally I’d crawl out of bed, but even as I turned the shower on in the bathroom and waited for the water to get hot, I couldn’t really manage to fully wake up. My eyes would be actually trying to close, even though I was standing up. And then I’d sit down on the toilet for a second and I’d blink and twenty minutes would have gone by, the steam from the shower would have totally clouded the bathroom, and my mom would be screaming at me once again to hurry up.

And then sitting through classes, it was torture. You couldn’t sleep or you’d get yelled at by the teacher. But my eyes still weren’t staying open on their own. Every time I’d blink, it was this struggle to pry my eyelids apart again. Double periods were the worst. Junior year we had chemistry. And it would have been nice if they gave us those three minutes in between classes to stretch our legs, to go to the bathroom. But nope, we always plowed on right through it, talking about stuff like Plank’s Constant, words that still have zero meaning to me, my body sinking further and further into the desk, stuck in this purgatory in between the waking world and sleep.

That’s what I feel like right now. I don’t know, I get a pretty decent sleep every night. Maybe because it’s raining out, one of those first cool autumn days of the year. But I’m struggling to stay awake. Maybe I should just lie down. Why fight it? I’m not in high school anymore. I can do whatever the hell I want.