The time change never bothered me before. Fall Back made everything maple, with one languid morning for our trouble. Spring Forward elbowed me an excuse to go to bed early, followed by a day that shone past dinner.

But now that I’m falling forward at the speed of fun, I repudiate this dastardly Daylight Savings. I will open my own community credit union, thank you, and I will invest in golden hours without assistance.

I did not always feel this way. Who does?

Some late-spring days, we don’t know where to bank time. The background Hertz hums and humbles us with baseline boredom. We are creative as mealworms. We invent errands to fold the day into a smaller square. We iron our underpants. We feel as jaunty as Jabba the Hutt.

This has nothing to do with busyness. Grueling work weeks may lead to unflavored-oatmeal weekends, haggard but hyperventilating for flow. When we find the banks as dry as burlap, there’s little we can do to save the salamanders as they sigh.

I would have welcomed Spring Forward on such days. But now I am falling forward. I did not expect this.

When the water was low, I peeled the last salamanders from the dust and dropped them in blue Ball jars. There were only a few inches sloshing, but it might keep them breathing for a time. Why was there so much time?

When my flow was faint, I guarded it with trembling. Would the cavalry come this week, the wrinkled wagon of words? Would I come through with some glimpse of light, some bran muffin for the masses?

It always felt like a Deus ex machina moment when the first flame caught. I sang glory hallelujahs as the last embers lent an exclamation point. Tomorrow, the world had to be remade again.

I extracted water by the eyedropper. I refused ridiculous suggestions, such as “give the salamanders some clover” or “raise the water level with apple juice” or — what is wrong with you? — “take the salamanders out to play with them.”

Until the salamanders made demands.

They demanded I filter expectations out of the Ball jar. Those contaminants were poisoning the water. They were wrapping my words in peaky preciousness, a genre favored only by the devil on my shoulder, who is barely literate and smells quite foul.

They demanded I provide wildflowers. Sure, they would suck up some water. Sure, there might be unanticipated side effects. Certainly, anti-anxiety medication can tell your body jokes that no one finds funny except the angel on your shoulder, who is rather brilliant and smells like gardenias.

They demanded that I go on at least one date with Lexapro.

They conscripted my kin. “Your magna mater is worried about your magma. Your ancestors are trying to bend those gritted teeth back into the smile they gave you.”

What’s the worst that could happen?

I could lose the power, stored too close to the pain.

Daily dread could glub down the drain with my manic magic. I foresaw creative collapse and writerly death. Decades of longing for a lost half-life.

It was a radioactive idea.

Funny, the things we think we know at the atomic level. I was convinced that fear was the price I had to pay for ecstasy. I guarded my symphonic hypomania and staggering speed. No one could keep up with me, not even me, but what would happen if I finally got caught?

I feared losing my job, my place, my Ball jars. I feared that fighting fear would give the devil his win. What then? I would still be dread-bombed, but without the lean golden hours that made lesser hours livable.

I had much to learn. I had much to surrender. It was that word — “surrender” — that ended the end and began the beginning.

This experiment would be an act of surrender to the Writer who gives and takes away words and flow and salamanders and clover and mothers and mercy and mania.

This experiment would end my friendship with Daylight Savings Time.

That was not my hypothesis. I watched with worry as dread, sulfur-yellow and thick as chowder, circled the drain. There were chunks in it. Was that my zest? The joy of wordplay? The hours that felt like kiss-instants?

Days passed. I wrote. I wrote! I wrote the usual. I wrote the unusual. I wanted to write more.

I wanted to write more, and I did write more. I wrote bayous of dreck. Salamanders laughed on the levees. The dreck did not destroy me. I wrote more. I wanted to write more, and I did write more.

The more I wrote, the more I wrote.

I could write about anything. I could write into villages where people gave free babka. I could write my day into something I could offer. I could write grey into pink, wounds into stitches, questions into kinder questions, dread into dumplings that might feed somebody.

I could jubilate in the fact that there is a town called Manunka Chunk, or in the baying of walruses, or in the buoyant eyebrows of my friends, or in the singing man who vacuums the condo hallway.

I could tear off hunks of cake without fear that less cake would remain.

What I could not do was stop.

What I could not do was unsee hope, bursting dams I’d thought were my bones, powering villages I’d thought were doomed to dusk.

What I could not do was love life less, love hours less, love the day any less than utterly.

I am falling forward into magic, manic mud, where all the salamanders survive. I am doing more than surviving. I am singing more than humming.

I am writing more than ever. I am writing more than time permits. The world is being remade, Deus ex machina, Deus ex surrender, Deus ex Angela.