The Night Before

You prepare yourself by laying out your clothes before you go to sleep, to maximize the amount of time you can logically spend in bed. You check the weather report on your phone, your laptop, and the evening news to ensure that you won’t need to run back to the closet to grab a hoodie, wasting moments that you could’ve spent asleep.

The Alarms

You have at least five alarms set to wake you up on your phone. Every fifteen minutes, they go off. At first they go off with a sweet gentle melody to draw you out of sleep. But after hitting snooze on the third alarm, the rest sound off with a siren that could stand in for a firetruck. The anger that you feel makes you miss the days of a clock radio that you could just slam your fist on and throw on the ground across the room. You wouldn’t dare do that with your smartphone. Sometimes the only things that can get you out of bed are a full bladder, or an empty stomach.

The Sleeping

The wonderful, glorious, magical time that you spend lying in bed sleeping. If you wake up in the middle of the night, you do a little happy dance because you get to sleep for a few more hours. When you wake up in the morning, you feel like crumpling in a heap. You hiss like a vampire when you open the window shades and flood the room with light. You shiver as you get undressed out of your pajamas and put on your cold, stiff jeans that you set out the night before. You crawl back into bed to warm yourself up, just for a few minutes, you tell yourself. You can't get enough sleep.

The Rush

You realize that you’re running late and you scramble to get out of the house. You brush your teeth as you tie your shoes. You panic as you look at the time and realize that you shouldn’t have gotten back into bed. You question if you should have watched that last episode on Netflix, and you feel like you could fall asleep standing up. When you finally meet up with your friends, they tease you for your messy hair and inside out shirt. You, however, tell them to be glad that you made it there in one piece at all.

The Promise

You tell yourself the next night that you won’t do the same thing; that you’ll go to bed early and be well rested so waking up won’t feel like emerging through quicksand. You understand that if you get to bed late, you’ll move at the pace of a slug, and promise yourself that you can wake up early. But then you remember all the homework you have to do that you forgot, or all of those shows filling up your DVR. You convince yourself that you can wake up easily on such little sleep, only to become a zombie in the morning.