Two Tacos at 2 AM

I'm enjoying a nap on a hot day during my freshman year of college. Suddenly, I feel a nudge on my shoulder. I look up, right into my roommate's face and I watch her mouth moving as clueless as a newborn baiji river dolphin. My ears are slow to wake, "what is she saying?" and "why the hell did she wake me up?" I wonder . Just around the second my hearing recovers, she repeats herself "Don't you have an exam?" I look at the neon-orange figures on my alarm clock behind my head. It's 11:37am. Oh my fucking god. I do. "Why didn't she wake me earlier?" 

My physical geography exam was scheduled for 11.30am. I realize I have no time to panic or to be angry, in fact all I have is hope and my two feet. Already clothed in my pyjamas , I put on my stripped Keds and run as fast as I could out of my dorm and towards the lecture hall . Inconveniently, the hall is the furthest building from my dorm, but I manage to get to the door. I burst into the quiet lecture hall, all out of breath and panting noticeably. A number of students turn their heads to have a furious look at the me, the pitiful distraction in pyjamas. I awkwardly make my way down the stairs and beg the professor for an exam paper in a whimper. He looks at his watch, and then back at me "I am sorry, you are 10 mins late, there is nothing I can do". I feel my heart sink and my eyes full of water. I couldn't do it there, I pack up my hope and run back to my room in tears.

My roommate was at her desk eating some Maruchan instant cup noodles and listening to K-pop ,while I was thinking of ways to strangle her without alerting the neighbours. Immediately, a quote from Dale Carnegie emerges into my thought "Calmly devote your time and energy to trying to improve upon the worst, that could possibly happen as a result of this failure, which you have already accepted mentally". I pick up my folder and pull out my syllabus, it reads "There will be four exams plus the final exam" AND "You may drop the lowest grade of the first four exams." This is a relief and I am able to think calmly but I still want my lowest grade to be the previous exam and not a zero. I had studied really hard for this exam. As I am about to put the syllabus away, my eyes lurk towards the top of the of the paper which reads "Section 300 in Lecture Hall 2 Time: 2:30 - 3:45 pm". I am still in tears but now I am full of disbelief and joy, there is a second session in a couple of hours.

I message my friend, who is in the second session, to verify if she has an exam today. Bingo! She does! I arrive at the lecture hall several hours before the exam. When students start flowing in, I immerse myself into the center of the crowd and follow diligently. I choose a seat at the upper-left of the class as I figure it would garner the least attention. I silently, pray that the professor wouldn't notice that I am the dimwit who was late to the exam. He starts handing out the exam, and I panic as he approaches me. He looks at me and he says something , I can't quite make out what he says but I start to freak out. I look helplessly into his stern face. "Can you pass these papers down?" he says. "Oh" I look beside me and a student is impatiently waiting on me to receive his exam papers "right". The exam began.

I am not even a fan of tacos, those silly hard shell never seem to stay together. But as a result of my post-traumatic sleep disorder, it is 2am and I am just having some tacos. Legend has it that deep in the fall of the year twenty hundred and ten, a terrible event had occurred. This event possessed the power to reshape the world right through her brown eyes. And so it began that every period the treacherous exams were declared, the nights became her day, the days became her night and the sleep she knew no more.