Everyone had always told me that each day had 24 hours, but from an early age, I believed them to be wrong. 

Now, this wild idea of missing time was something no clock would show. Everyone whom I tried to explain this abstract concept to would call me a lunatic, tell me that I was simply denying reality. I, however, never thought I was crazy. How could I deny something that I’d experienced a thousand times?

In my head, the days you spend with friends always lack the amount of time as the days you spend alone. Why else would time move so fast when you are with them? One moment, you’re sitting underneath your favorite childhood tree, snacking on honey sandwiches while you exchange little rocks and observe the crawling bugs below you. The sun, having been up for only a few hours, is still that early gold that comes with a fresh morning, emitting the kind of light that highlights all the most glorious things of the world. The next, your parents are dragging you back toward the house as that same sun, once new and glimmering, is now old and dull, disappearing beyond the horizon with nothing more than a singular ray to guide you home. As a kid, it didn’t seem logical to me why the day ended so quickly. How could the sun take so long to set on the days I was stuck inside, yet be gone in a blink when I actually had someone to keep me company? After much calculation, I concluded that there was only one logical explanation: the day must’ve been missing time. Something happened, some peculiar phenomenon deep within the universe that occurred only on the days I was with my friend, which made it so that those specific days had fewer seconds, fewer minutes, fewer hours than others. It was an odd concept, but at the ripe age of five, I knew there could be no other answer. This had to be what was happening.

Now, ten years later, I believe I’ll once again be encountering one of those days.

I’d awoken long before the sun and was completely dressed by the time the first ray of dawn filtered in through my cracked window. A soft morning breeze, the kind that carries the promise of a warm, comfortable summer day, filtered in through the screen, running down my neck. I must’ve left the window open again; it really was a bad habit of mine. It had started a few years ago when, after a day of enjoying the breeze, I suddenly came to fear I’d have no escape route if someone ever decided to break into our house and kill me. On the verge of tears, I’d gone to bed with the window cracked. What I failed to realize was that leaving the window cracked just enough to be visible to anyone on the other side would be more likely to attract a serial killer than a dark and locked house. Still, each night, I built a habit of opening my window early that afternoon and closing it the next morning. My mother was furious with me about it; my father couldn’t have cared less. That was the issue between them: one cared too much while the other didn’t care enough. Now, though that fear was mostly gone, I still had a bad habit of falling asleep with it cracked. It didn’t matter much to me; I liked feeling the cool summer winds. Besides, I was always up so early that I could have it closed by the time my mother came in to tell me it was time for breakfast. When school starts in a few weeks, I’m sure I’ll have to work on closing it when my mother makes me fix my sleep schedule. Early mornings usually make me groggy after being awake for a few hours, and grogginess was strictly forbidden when academic excellence was on the line. My instinct to wake up before the sun could easily be quelled with a few doses of melatonin and a strict talking-to that night. 

However, on summer break, my sleeping schedule could be as messed up as I liked. On this particular night, I’d gone to bed at two in the morning and woken up at five. Three hours of sleep wouldn’t last me long, but I could always count on taking a nap once I got back home. Besides, the hours of sleep my body was running on were the last thing on my mind. I had someone to meet with, the one person whom I genuinely looked forward to seeing.

By the time I finally got myself dressed, stared at the wall for a moment, and closed my window, it was going on seven. My mom was usually up by then, heating up some leftovers from the night before that she would try to arrange in some manner to resemble a breakfast. There were many mornings when she’d make mashed potatoes the night before and then, that morning, reheat them in the microwave and cover them in ketchup, claiming that they were “freestyle hashbrowns”. For someone who cared about everything with so much fervor, she couldn’t have cared less about what my father and I ate. I always forced down a portion of whatever she made, told her how good it was, then left and bought myself a muffin or granola bar at the gas station before heading to school. My father, who despised her cooking like a hyena despises a lion, refused to eat anything and simply got himself food on the way to work. Of course, my mother took this heart and added it to her list of reasons to hate him back. I don’t even know how long it’s been since we last sat down at the table together. This morning, I knew it’d be the same disgusting food situation, though I at least had an excuse to grab a package of Pop-Tarts and head out the door.