Poetry & Thoughts

The Procrastinator

There was a girl, her name is not spoken of because she could be identified as anyone, even yourself. She was better known as the procrastinator.

If you would give her anything she still wouldn't do it until the last minute. Especially for a college she was absolutely dying to get into.
For weeks her teachers and parents have been bugging her to get herself together and get it done. She's had many opportunities to get it done and over with, but she was too optimistic about getting it completed over the weekend.

However that wasn't the case, turns out her brother's college was having a family day, and her parents insisted that she would tag along. Instead of freaking out as anyone else would've done, she calmed herself quickly and cooed herself that she would be able to do it on sunday, "It's no big deal" she thought to herself as she climbed into the car to go to UNH(University of New Hampshire).

Big mistake that was for her, because now it's Sunday night, the clock reading 11:15pm with no paper written and on top of that it's a school night. Sitting at her white creme wooden desk with her mind racing with continuous thoughts of failure, her heart picking up speed by the second as she tries to get the paper completed on time so she can sleep well tonight.
Her hand cramping as she grips tightly onto the mechanical pencil as she writes, beads of sweat forming from her forehead from all of the anxieties her conscious is giving her; telling her she's a disappointment of a student, to her teachers, to everyone, and herself.

Once she is done writing the paper assignment, the poor girl who has lost a full night's sleep, is now finally going to bed, the girl's eyes painfully drift one last time to the clock that's hung from her wall reading 3:30am. She then peacefully shuts her eyes and relaxes her body into her squishy foam mattress, as the blankets do the same. Just right after she's found her comfortable sleeping position, darkness swallows her into a tranquility of restless slumber.

As what felt like two seconds, her Amazon Echo Dot(familiarly known as an "Alexa") alarm clock blares from the inside of her room. Not wanting to move, she still forces herself to get up and move nevertheless.
She first props herself up onto her bottom so that her feet dangle off the right side of her bed, the pads of her feet touching the cold hard wooden floor causing her to shiver on sight. Her eyes graze upon to the wall in front of her that reads, 7:17am.

Seventeen minutes until the public school bus comes to the front of her house, seventeen minutes to get dressed into her school attire she picked out the night before.

Afterwards she hoists herself up from her previous sitting position and trudges over to the bathroom thats across the hallway from her bedroom. Starting off by brushing her teeth and washing her face with her favourite face wash, 'Clear-Pore'. Later after she does that part of her daily routine, all that's left is to get dressed and prepared for a long six hour day at school.

She still is constantly looking at the clock each minute so she won't be late to the bus if she dillydallies for too long.
The clock telling her it's 7:25 am and she needs to move fast, and as the time passes more, the same shameful thoughts still adrift in her conscious, creeping in and soon takes over her entire thought process.

Time skip to class time, the teacher is presenting the main topic for the agenda for the day, and this is English class, the girl's class that she's been dreading all night and morning. The project was based as a writing assignment for her English classmates to makeup on their own time and in sometimes in class time.
A English assignment that is worth a big grade for the girl and the rest of her fellow pupils. It's also beneficial for a college to look back upon to see if she's improved from Freshman year to Sophomore year as a growing student who will soon be going into the personally selected college.

As the thought of being judged for her writing seeps further into the girl's mind, she begins to bite at her fingernails out of pressure and built up nerves, thinking she's unable to get into her dream college. The teacher is speaking in the background almost as a dull white noise, the only main focus is the girl silently having a panic attack, thoughts of regret, regretting to push off the project until the last minute.

Mentally slapping herself in the face when she rethinks the opportunities she could have taken advantage of earlier on, "If I just did what was expected of me, I wouldn't even be in this mess, I wouldn't be sitting her like a deer in headlights, so scared to even move." The only thing moving is her shaking leg that bobs up and down, the heel of her foot never touching the carpeted floors, only the tip of her sneaker.

More thoughts appear in her mind, "I'm never going to get into URI(University of Rhode Island), not when I've messed up this bad.."

The girls eyes wander to the rest of her peers of the classroom and notices they only have a worksheet out in front of them and not the written work, second guessing herself if she even got the due date correctly she looks over the left where her good acquaintance friend is writing away on the given paper, and the girl asks her friend, "Hey, when is the assignment due? It's today right?". The puzzled friend looks at her with her eyebrows furrowed together in complete confusion, "No? It's due on Wednesday, not today." And with that she continues on with writing on her sheet without another word.

Meanwhile, the sleep deprived, forgetful procrastinator is sitting back and rethinking every little moment of stress, and how it was all for nothing. Every low blow of self-esteem was just a big joke.
She takes on look at her paper with a big breath of air and shakes head in disappointment as she grabs a writing utensil to begin the given worksheet.

In the end the girl was able to turn in and print the final draft of her assignment, with time on her hands as she has until Wednesday to get it completed, she instead went back and edited the rough draft to make it more perfect than it was before.
She learned two things, do things that you don't want to do, it will help you in the long run. And never underestimate yourself, you might think it's one date rather than the other date. Check in for yourself, self advocate in case you're stuck or in her case staying up until 3am to finish an important English assignment.

Never be like The Procrastinator.

~Olivia