fluke.

A 7 never seemed like a high number until you experience the pain of revising triple the time, think you it it all by heart, skip happily to the exam only to be stopped dead in your tracks by the menacing black ink on the impeccably white paper.

For a few moments, you are engrossed in the dazzling smoothness, the cold elegant beauty of the blank sheet of exam paper. It strikes you that this flimsy sheet of paper could symbolize missed opportunities, inadequate abilities, pent-up frustrations or a hard-earned pass to your beautiful dreams. Regardless of the questions, you could boldly continue to stare at it for the entire exam time, defying the conventions of good marks = bright student in an exhilarating run towards an ultimate parallel universe enclosed in your mind.

How can a mere number or grade even reflect your true capabilities? Maybe it's pure egocentricalism, but I sometimes wonder if doing all this is even worth a second of my time.

Tick. Tock. The clock rushes on. Stare at meeee, it seems to coo. I'm a freak of your imagination. Tick. Your eyeballs obey, willingly drawn to the small mechanical jerks of the puppet around it's cage.

The blue pen on the desk seems to be the next most fascinating object in the world. Click. Clickclickclickclick. Hey.. it has a nice sound too, you think. Hmm, lets unscrew it and see. A drop of bruised blue ink accidentally sinks into your thumb, traling the intricate maze used so often as our identification. Bahahaa; I can sign this paper off with my thumbprint. 无聊. Glancing back at the clock you see an hour remaining. With great haste you scan the question while your fingers lazily start scrawling discombobulated handwriting on the clean lined paper. It's brief cool touch amazes you and you wonder at the incredible crispness of the paper.

No, Char, no.
Stop getting distracted. 
Focus-
  -focus. 
Yes. ahhh, good. Good.

You finish the test just when the Filipino invigilator snatches it out from under you hands and walk towards the hot throng of people clustered around the doors. What the heck is the definition for infrastructure? I totally blanked our on the graph for indirect taxation again! Are they trying to make our brains adapt to working in sub-zero conditions? (tehehehees, we should use our bio knowledge of enzymatic reactions to appeal to the administrators...) OMG i need to pee.

I felt stunned. As though I had just been roughly woken up from the brink of a discovery. Craving silence, you walk away to catch the bus down the hill.

Alone.

Hey, you okay? DK appears, tilting his head. Don't just run off by yourself.
I felt like doing just that. Whats the matter with doing stuff alone anyways? Whats the big deal?
Yea.. just tired. Lol, Somehow I think concentrating for too long makes you feel anti-social afterwards.
*Smile.
Aww, come on, really?
Dammn. Hate how I feel like the only person to think like, well, me.
Yep.

Got that test back the next week. The red 7 scribbled on the front page stupefied me. How could that be? I flicked through the pages slowly, then with more urgency - was there some mistake? But no. The essay response was as I had remembered: marred by a few false-starts and the distinctly smeared thumbprint (OMGSSHH why did I think that was a good thing to do? There was also a brigh red circle around my print with a huge questionmark on the side and Mr C had to mention that I was so bored as to start making thumbprints on my paper =.='.)

It was not a high 7 (by that, the 90's had completely evaded me), but neither was it a borderline one.

Busying myself doing the corrections, I felt quite conflicted. Was This It? An empty hollow sense of satisfaction dug into my ribs.

Being too easily tempted by distractions could perhaps be my biggest weaknesses (i.e. now. Yes, NOW. Go do your homework ctxl.. Nah.). It fills up time doing pointless things. Which- I had succumbed to terribly to in the test. And you could say, its the Major one that counted to my final predicted grade uni's would be using.

Somehow, I managed it, but it felt horribly like a fluke. 
lctx.