Time. It’s a unit of measure, a noun, and something that many don’t know how to keep track of as it passes by. Being imperfect creations, humans are known to take time for granted and abuse it for their own personal gain. They waste the amount of time given to them, and then beg for more time; they don’t care about time in general.
They just enjoy the fact that they posses something that certain beings just can’t have.
Darren use to be a large part of this statistic. He was prone to be the man who was always late, the one always brushing off time. It wasn’t his fault, he really tried to be more cautious about the time he uses, how much time he is given, and how those around him view time.
The way he obsesses with time isn't normal in the society he was born into, and most people think he is crazy, but he wasn't. He was just attentive.
The thing about Darren is that when he becomes interested in something too much, he can’t stop thinking about it. He obsesses and over analyses. What he loves some how interlocks with his personality until it becomes him. It happened with science, it happened with English, and now it’s happening with time.
Darren was currently sitting in the back of his history class, anxiously watching the clock. Tick tock, tick tock, tick tock. Oh, how Darren lived for that noise. The sound of time passing was like music to his ears, and he was just in love with the way clocks worked. There were approximately 103 gears, bolts, screws and nuts in a normal analog clocks. Digital clocks were more wired and had more circuits, facts that fascinated Darren to no end.
His class ended at 10:35 AM. The bell actually rang at 10:35:04 AM, meaning that the bells were delayed by four seconds. How could no one check to make sure they were exact, Darren thought. Why delay everyone and cause such inconveniences? This all baffled Darren, but it didn’t stop him from keeping watch of the clock, drumming his leg nervously.
The minute hand struck to the seven, and Darren started the count down. Four, three, two, one—and then the bell rang. Darren smiled in satisfaction as he grabbed his books and stood up. His friends, Mathew and Cameron were going on about topics he found irrelevant as he just thought about the way time was measured.
In the real world, i.e., Earth, time is measured by seconds, minutes and hours. These measurements aren’t completely accurate, but just the way the human race thought to count. There was no logical way to prove or define that a whole year was based off the Earth’s complete the Sun’s rotation; or that a whole calendar year is 365 days. It is just predictions made by the Roman Catholics. And since no one has taken up the challenge to disprove this theory, it’s the humans live.
Darren didn’t understand how to disprove any of these facts really, but being able to disprove them would be life changing. He just needed to find a way how.
“…On the psych test, Darren?”
“Hmm?” He furrowed his eyebrows, turning to his quiet enraged friend, Mathew.
The boy glared, rubbing his left temple, “I said, what’d you get on your psych test?”
“Oh,” Darren muttered, opening his locker. “98. You?”
“Man, I got an 91. How’d you finish your test so fast?”
Darren shrugged, grabbing his psychology textbook. “I kept track of how many questions there are per page, and how much time we have for the entire test. The marks for each question depend on how much time is being used, so, I have an approximate estimation on how long that test should have taken me.”
When neither boy’s face changed to expressions of understanding, Darren sighed, “A question with one mark rankings take about 1.3 minutes to answer, not including actual reading of the question. Two mark question, 2.4 minutes, four marks, 3.34 minutes and so on all the way to using about 7.54 minutes to answer questions up to 8 marks. The amount of time we had to take that test was, at my best estimate, 65 minutes, and fifty four seconds. There were exactly 16 questions on that test, and by my calculation it only took me 41.76 minutes to complete that test. Leaving me with 23.78 minutes to check over my answers and hand in my test. It’s all in the numbers.”
Darren’s other friend, Cameron, scoffed, holding his books to his chest. “There is no possible way you could have figured out how much time you needed to do that test and then still finished first. We’re your best friends, so just tell us: did you cheat or something?”
“Intelligent people don’t need the option of cheating. But I’m not surprised you didn’t know that.”
Cameron and Mathew stared at who they thought was their friend with gapping expressions. Darren’s chest was heaving, and he was beginning to become angered. His breaths were contracting at what Darren assumed were about 2.13 milliseconds each inhalation, and he was starting to see spots. Why must they always discourage my love for time? It’s an interest everyone should endure in, it will make everything more organized and it could help with so many problems in this world. So why disagree on learning about it?
“Darren, buddy,” Mathew asked, slowly walking towards the hyperventilating boy. “You okay?”
Cameron nodded, placing a hand on his friend’s shoulder. “Just breath. Did you take your medication this morning?”
Darren shoved them both off, a glare now permanently plastered on his face. Darren took his medication, though he didn’t actually need it. He was fine. Darren wasn’t obsessed this time. His OCD had nothing to do with his love of numbers and time. It was all in pure interest. Nothing but simple interest in the way humans document passing’s in their lives is all. He was not obsessed.
“Y-Yes,” he seethed, roughly playing with the straps of his bag. “I took my medication this morning. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to go to class. We only have about 2 minutes and 37 seconds left before the delayed bell rings.”
“Delayed?”
“Yes. Our bells are delayed by approximately four seconds. Actually, four seconds exactly. Now goodbye. I’ll see you at lunch.”
“You know, Darren,” Cameron called after him. “You may be so punctual now, and so obsessed with time, but you’re never actually going to realize that you’re wasting all your time now.”
“That’s not possible,” Darren countered, his blood rushing through his veins at a high temperature. “I will always have a better understanding of time than you, making time wasting for me, obsolete.”
As the days passed on, Darren hadn’t noticed how independent he had become. His friends became fed up with his obsession with time, and told him that when he was done playing Father Time, he could hangout with them again. Darren didn’t hear this of course, as he was taking a part and reassembling a analog clock and comparing it to a digital one.
This obsession that had become a part of Darren wasn’t like any other. He was starting to zone out other parts of is everyday life to actually take interest in this topic; he wasn’t eating, he wasn’t sleeping, he rarely took his medication. His obsession with time, ironically, was causing him to actually waste his time. Darren would loose focus, he would start do to the one thing he was trying to prevent himself from every accomplishing:
He was loosing time. Time was slipping right through his fingers and there was no way of stopping it now.
The stressed out boy was now rushing, grabbing this messily and running down the stairs to at a time so he wouldn’t be late for school. He made sure he grabbed a lunch, which really was only an apple, and he flew out of his house, running to be on time.
Once he arrived at his school, he had just made the warning bell, he bolted down the hall, rushing up two flights of stairs to get to his English class on time. When he arrived in his seat, he was panting and could barely keep his eyes focused as he rested his head against his desk.
He saw Cameron pulling out an assignment Darren didn’t remember receiving, and he glanced around the room. Everyone was pulling out their assignments and placing them at the corners of their desks to be collected.
Oh no.
Darren hadn’t done his essay, being to caught up in his clock comparisons. He had completely abused the time he was given and focused on things that weren’t important, and now it was catching up with him. His teacher walked down the desk columns, picking up the essays off the children’s desks, and when she got to Darren’s he paled.
“Um, ma’am,” he muttered. “I don’t have my essay done. I can get it to you by tomorr—“
“Five mark deduction,” she stated in a monotone voice, turning to take the next student’s assignment.
“B-But, please! All I need is a little more time. I was sidetracked before, but I promise I can get it done, just please don’t—“
The older woman quickly snapped back towards him, her eyes frantic and annoyed. “Young man, you have been given enough time on this assignment. You children abuse so much time, and I am not going to be coddling you for your own misfortunes.”
Darren’s breaths became uneven as he saw the teacher end the conversation. This isn’t possible, he thought. I obsessed over time. I studied. I lived it. How could I have abused it so easily when my main priority was to get others to savour it?
“Well,” a voice said next to him. He looked up to see Cameron smiling smugly as he handed their teacher his essay. “As the saying goes; time flies when you’re having fun, right?”
Darren’s stomach dropped as he realized what had happened. His obsession to not waste time only indicated that he focused all his time on time. He ignored other obstacles in his life to keep track of his time, which did the complete opposite of his original intentions.
He had lost his time. And there was no way of getting it back, so naturally, Darren decided to just do what he always did.
He ignored his teacher at the front, and stared at the clock hanging against his classroom’s wall, waiting for the delayed bell to ring.
Because, just like all the other times in his life, those delayed four seconds was time he was never going to obtain again.
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