)
[Pixabay](https://pixabay.com/photos/search/one%20minute%20left/)
The microwave counts down and all of a sudden you're conscious of time in a way you weren't thirty seconds earlier. One minute left. Sixty seconds. Depending on what you are doing with it, a whole minute is nothing and everything.
With one minute left on the exam, your hand cramps and races to fill in bubbles you should have finished twenty minutes ago when you were daydreaming about being anyplace else. You are looking at your phone. Traffic is on your mind.
Later, you would give everything, EVERYTHING, for one more minute; cosmic joke is you had it and spent it scrolling; you are elsewhere but here.
Once you start paying attention, one minute becomes the organizing force of your entire life. The ongoing countdown.
The timer you can feel ticking in your bones but can't see.
Minutes are wasted like they are infinite. Like there's a warehouse somewhere full of backup minutes we can access when we finally decide to start living.
There isn't.
One minute left means fifty-nine seconds earlier you ought to have begun.