Cloaking the wooden ground of my cave is a hurricane of shirts that lay wrinkled along the unfolded jeans that haphazardly strews on top floorboards but under the black strips of leggings and cotton t-shirt. Struck barren by the chaos scattered on the floor, the closet is empty. No order.

The fabric dunes blinks at me, but  we pretend not to know each. I ignore the frustration in its eyes. Instead, I tiptoe around and hop over these dunes, and instead, to the tired papers and the cramped pens and the stressed checklists drag me towards them. Find the derivative. Remember that rule. You have a test tomorrow. The artificial light seems even harsher under the night’s darkness, and a hand starts to scribble on its own.

My shoulders slump over extraneous numbers, so when a bright, white screen whispers Come over here, I listen. It’s like a tornado, a whirlwind of random videos and random posts and random stories that don’t do anything but distract me from the randomness behind me. It grows each morning and night, left unattended and ignored. A tangled texture. Somewhere in me, somewhere dusty and dark knows I should stop and escape this distraction. If you don’t stop now, there is no way you’re going to finish this night. But this HD black hole pulls me in deeper. My fingers are guided over dark keys as my ears rest in the rhythm of clicks and taps. My eyes are bolted unmoveable. Yet, the strained silence that follows is full of voices I never met before. Ten minutes, one, two hours blows by. Click. I try to negotiate with unforgiving Time: One more click. Five more minutes, no ten, but a small seed whispers that we are not negotiating, that Time is tricking me, that Time is running away. Click. But I don’t want to listen, so I trick myself too. I have enough time. Because what sounds better? The dull flips of a page, the rough scratches of highlights and pens, or someone else sharing how they make a poached egg? You never know when that may come in handy…  Click.

— 🌀 —

Wait—shouldn’t I be studying right now?

Soon, desperation floods into my cave, but I’m not surprised. I’m frustrated, angry, stressed, annoyed—but I am not surprised. This was forecasted, predicted from a series of patterns that I never seem to navigate and neutralize. I wish this was a surprise so I could claim that I didn’t know this was coming. I want to protest, but I just futilely conjure excuses and alibis. This isn’t my fault. Dates and grades both come at me like a stream of harsh water that threatens to drown my head. That returned test reinforces what I already knew, that I should’ve studied more, that I wasn’t ready. Those numbers and rules all seem to be laughing along with that stark red number inked at the top.

You did this.

The piles on the floor grow, the closet still forgotten as I give in to the torrent of water and wind, of desperation and stress, and return back once more to those precarious paper towers. Find the correlation. Find the velocity. What’s Snell’s Law? And like usual, my hand scribbles and scribbles and scribbles it hangs limply Just a little break, I tell myself. Just for ten minutes. And like usual, Time isn’t always “just.”

Days and nights pass by as due dates and deadlines scamper away. A door opens. A chair moves closer to a desk. The backpack unzips.

I don’t really realize it yet, but my room is out of control, now. Where is the floor? Where did I put that shirt? I mess up my new closet—the floor—even more as I try to find that shirt I know I put somewhere or that other pair of jeans that have to be somewhere around here…

“Clean your room,” reminds a voice, my mother’s. I agree, saying that I will eventually, that I’ll get to that when I have time, but really, I ignore my own room and the mess it’s in. It’s not really a lie when you are going to get to that sometime… right?

But it doesn’t work, not this time. I open my door, but instead of shuffling over to my distractions, I lean down beside my tangled texture, the hurricane I created.

And I clean up. I fold the shirts in the long half, and again and again, until a flat rectangle appears in my hands. I fold those sweatshirts lying in that corner, that t-shirt I barely ever wear, and those shorts crumpled at the base of the closet door. How did I ever become this messy? This disorganized? I remember when every week didn’t have a date weighing it down, every morning felt refreshing and awake. I fold my pants with the sameness and precision that feels so satisfying. Three folds down its length. Lightest to darkest. I fit back my jeans right on the bottom shelf of my closet. Lightest to darkest. Seconds and minutes and hours flit by, and slowly I piece back my life together, brushing out wrinkles and lumps, organizing those rectangles of shirts, which become a straight slices that line up in the middle shelf of my white wall. My back begins to hurt, so I quickly rest; however soon, I’m back to folding, to organizing, to returning.

My floor becomes like a freshly harvested field. No longer do my clothes scatter chaotically all around, and no longer will my life fling out aimlessly. The ground is bare, and its emptiness shines back at me. Remember me?

I grin at my finished masterpiece of organization and determination. Of course.

— 🌀 —

But it’s not like I forgo my work and my grades, and it’s definitely not like I am banning myself from Google, because no matter how much they distract and overwhelm you, they are yours. The fine thread distinguishing between distraction and pleasure, organization and chaos, work and fun, lives precariously in your own hands. But as fine as the thread is, it’s hard always holding it. So, when it feels like that line is draw me into another disaster, yes, I let go sometimes. Because like always, it's the balance of knowing when you should let go and when you should continue.