Five Minutes Late

The Rabbit went to university and lived across the road from where it was taught.

A minute's walk.
Less.

And still it was late.

Not by much.
Five minutes, usually.
The same five minutes, again and again, as though they had been measured out and assigned.

The Rabbit would wake to the sound of a lecture that had already started.
It would cross the road with its coat half on.
It would arrive as the room was settling, find a seat near the back, and pretend it had always meant to enter exactly then.

It was not that the Rabbit did not care.
It cared.
It set alarms.
It planned to be early, sometimes, and meant it.

But time did not hold the same shape for the Rabbit as it seemed to for everyone else.
There was no smooth runway between waking and arriving.
There was only the moment before, in which there was all the time in the world, and the moment after, in which there was none.
No part in between where the Rabbit could stand and prepare.

Other animals seemed to feel something the Rabbit did not.
A pull forward.
A sense of the future arriving on schedule, that let them rise and move and be in place before it came.

The Rabbit only felt the future once it was already here.

So it was five minutes late.
Across the road from where it needed to be.
Close enough to touch, and still, somehow, behind.