I put my head down on the desk, on top of my arms, which were covered in a pink sweater. I heard the teacher saying how my essay was too long. A frenzied girl was worried about going four lines over the two-page limit we had been given for the assignment. Mine was two and a half pages.

I took my breaths slow and deep, sharpening the edges of the dull nausea that had been pulsing through my body since lunch.

Head still down, I opened my eyes and blinked questioningly at the three words I saw in front of my face. They were from a philosophy note I had written two weeks earlier about common inductive mistakes. The three words made a statement, framed between my sweatered limbs: today, beautiful, time.

Turning to the forgotten, blank paper in the back of my violently pink binder with the temperamental zipper, I tore a scrap and wrote down the unitentional epiphany. Liz, the senior who sits behind me, laughed and asked if the little piece of notebook paper was my cheat sheet for the logic test next week.

"No," I answered, fumbling for how to describe it, "Just something I wanted to remember."

"Why?" People are curious things. In both contexts.

"Because I forget things."