Category: Personal

I was walking to uni the other day, and I was running late. I had a lecture at 10am and I was cutting it REALLY fine. I still had a good two, maybe three hundred meters to go. I had one minute to make this lecture, which was supposed to be a remarkably important lecture from a special guest up from Sydney, so being late would have been an opportunity to be made an example of by my lecturer, and having spent the night before awake until 4am working on an assignment, I was not in the mood to have that done to me.

So, here I am, running late, terrified of the consequences should I not make it in time, still a few hundred meters until I reach my destination. I look at my phone to check the time, and see that it’s 9.59. I have less than a minute to make it to class.

And it is at this point, in sheer panic and stress and sleep deprivation, that a thought crosses my mind that was the stupidest thing I’ve thought in a long time.

So I look down at the clock on my phone, 9.59, and I have ONE MINUTE to get to class on time and avoid humiliation. ONE MINUTE.

And then I hear a little voice inside my brain say, “It’s okay, you can make it…”

“If you sprint…”

IF. I. SPRINT.

I’m sorry, brain. What part of my physique do you not understand? Sprinting? NO CAN DO. Surely you can work out why? I’m a fatty, fatty boomba who gets a sense of fulfillment if I can make it to the end of the driveway and back without having an asthma attack.

“If you sprint.” Sometimes my own idiocy bewilders even me.

You know what I really hate?

I found a piece of paper while I was walking home. It was lying on its side in the grass, still crisp and clean, folded twice. I could see from the ragged edge that it had been torn from a large notebook, not unlike the one tucked away in my oversized handbag.

I looked at this piece of paper in the long, green grass, wondering momentarily what to do. My curiosity won out in the end, so I picked it up and carefully unfolded it to look for a name or some identifying mark so that I might return it to its owner.

It wasn’t the scholarly notes I had been expecting, rather a vague kind of family tree. There were no names, just titles like ‘Mommy’, and a few nationalities: English, Irish, Scottish, Maltese; all scrawled onto the page in black felt tip pen. There also seemed to be a short chronology of events in the individual’s life, including years spent in Hong Kong.

I felt a little strange, like a voyeur observing the remnants of a conversation I wasn’t meant to hear, and would never fully understand. I was touched to think I had been granted this look at someone’s personal make up, a strange mistake that had worked in my favour. I felt special to have been given the honour of finding this intimate insight, lost on a slip of notepad paper, torn out and lost in the grass, folded twice in half.

In awe of the power of such a strange find, I folded it back along its crease lines; once, twice, then in half again, and slipped it into my back pocket for further reading at a later time.

As I continued on my way, I stumbled across another slip of paper, much worse for wear; torn and stained by old mud.

It was a receipt from Big W. The previous owner had bought chocolate and a doorstop. It wasn’t that interesting, so I threw it in the bin, where I felt it belonged, because it just wasn’t nearly as good as my other find, lost in the fresh, green grass.