Math quiz first hour. Spanish quiz third hour.
I forgot to study for both, despite them being the only thing I thought about all day.
English homework is due, and somehow, I’ve forgotten to do Membean three weeks in a row.
A study guide due tomorrow is sitting crumpled in my backpack, and I know I’ll forget about it until five minutes before I have to turn it in.
My planner is dripping with the invisible ink of my avoidance; procrastination paints the pages blank.
It is deceivingly empty. Nothing due today, nothing due tomorrow, no homework for the rest of my life.
That’s what the pristine sheets show you, but they’re lying.
Two days until my TED talk.
I still have to add pictures of my childhood and things colored yellow. Or maybe blue.
I can’t remember which; I probably should’ve written it down.
But I don’t want to do that to the perfectly blank pages; I can’t mar the clean slate of my week with the black, spilling ink of my assignments.
Instead, I write them on my hands. I let them pile up in my head until it’s splitting. I set them safely behind my ribs where I can forget about them until they tangle and knot and block my airways and arteries.
24 days until the APUSH exam.
I need to be studying more, but you wouldn’t know that by looking at my calendar.
My to-do lists are fraudulent; I wish that they were telling the truth.
I cannot write anything down in a list, a planner, or a calendar because they are already too choked by my delayed work and forgotten tasks.
Homework is due tomorrow, and I don’t know what it is.
I would write it down but that would eliminate my excuse for forgetting about them. I would write it down, but I’ve forgotten already, and I am overwhelmed by the expanse of items I should have added months ago.
Time and time again, my procrastination proves to be fruitless and prompts a panicked frenzy of mediocre work done the night or hour before.
I need to write it down. I need to start now.
I need to force the stress inked under my skin onto paper.
I need to wash my planner free of its invisible ink and make room for my to-do lists.
But, the water destroys the paper. The soap soaks into the blank pages, and it’s impossible to comprehend even trying to write anything down.
It becomes another thing I don’t want to deal with, something else to shove under my desk and to the back of my mind.
I tell myself that I’ll wait for the pages to dry.
I tell myself that I’m setting it on my desk to use again at the end of the day when the water has evaporated, but I know that it’s a lie.
My empty calendars, my blank planners, and my nonexistent to-do lists will sit under piles of other papers on my desk until they are nothing more than a festering discomfort between my lungs every time I take a deep breath.
