Slipping

Good morning.  It’s 5:30 in the morning; it’s a random Monday during Junior year.  You were up until three in the morning last night finishing an essay; it’s perfect and you’ve never been more proud of an assignment in your life.  As you lie in your dark room listening to the alarm, you feel as though your soul were withering and dying at the notion that you have to get out of bed and go to school for another week.  You tumble out of bed and shuffle to the bathroom.  The shower sings to life and you stand under the scorching water, trying to warm up.  You dress, grab some food and coffee (the coffee is what matters; food is secondary), and sprint out the door to make your bus.  While you drive to school you read the article you were supposed to finish last night and scrawl some annotations down in the side margins.  Sweat makes your grip slippery as the fifth stop rolls by and you realize you aren’t anywhere near done.  You arrive and sprint inside, nodding to your friends before slamming your books onto the desk of your first period class and frantically completing your annotations.  All of your classes blur together into a whirl of people teachers tests textbooks questions homework vocab until it’s time for lunch.  You feel the heavy backpack cut into your shoulders as you make your way to the cafeteria, the weight of the world weighing you down and bending your back into submission.  You sit with your friends and joke a bit, but mostly you work on homework, which either is due next period or was assigned last period.  You proceed to your final classes and then the bell rings, setting you free.  However, you’re in your junior year and colleges are looking at you, so despite the heavy weariness sapping your strength and the mountain of work to do, you drag yourself to a club for your resume and enjoy the meeting as much as you can as evil whispers in the back of your mind speak of the homework you need to finish and the tests you think you failed.  The club ends and you hurry to a sport, because it’ll make you appear balanced even as your mind teeters out of control.  Your thoughts are numb as your muscles automatically stretch and flex to do what they must in order to complete the practice.  As you walk out of the door you run into the teacher for whom you wrote the essay.  He’s finished grading it, and lets you see your grade before he leaves.  Staring up at you is a big red 84, and you calmly hand it back even though on the inside you feel everything in you crumbling.  That’s not nearly good enough; with grades like that you’ll never get into the college you want.  You wander to the bus, sit in silence, and shuffle home, where you sit and work all night.  Repeat.