It’s 2 am, and I’m meant to be sleeping,  

but I can't because there is a lot on my mind.  

This assignment is one of them,  

well over a month overdue,  

It’s funny at this point.  

Three years ago, when I started homeschooling,  

this overdue assignment and its margin would have horrified me.  

If I’m honest, it would have given me a panic attack.  

Now? It doesn’t even phase me.  

I open my laptop in the morning,  

and grimace at the sight of overdue work.  

I ponder for a moment, then avoid the subject,  

deciding to work around it.  

Procrastinating and avoiding at all costs,  

I bounce from science to Bible to history to math to Spanish,  

all of this a distraction,  

succeeding in pushing deadlines weeks ahead,  

just to avoid a single assignment.  

It’s ironic:  

doing so much more work to avoid one mentally draining task.  

Crippling procrastination combined with hyperfocus,  

an interesting combination.  

I look back at the list,  

I see this assignment,  

and I sigh, knowing I have to finish it.  

I open the Google Doc, and lean back in my chair.  

I laugh in my mind at how absurd I’ve become.  

How pathetic I am compared to what I used to be.  

I used to be an academic weapon ,  

Now I feel more like an academic spoon.  

I laugh harder, all mentally, of course.  

At face level, I look stoic and focused.  

This assignment isn’t inherently hard.  

I just tend to overthink.  

Because I’m not a poet,  

I can’t write poetry.  

I just feel,  

I feel so hard that it rushes through my veins.  

I feel so hard that the feeling in my veins reaches my heart.  

My heart adds fuel to the fire,  

pumping, pumping till that feeling circulates over,  

and over again through my body.  

Until the feeling becomes thick,  

and congealed, and cold.  

It’s sticking in my veins.  

I feel the weight of it in my veins.  

I like to think of it as cholesterol,  

because one day, all these feelings will sneak up on me  

and give me a ‘heart attack.’  

But until that day comes, ignorance is bliss.  

But as an overthinker, ignorance is impossible,  

making bliss a fever dream.  

This one feeling, spurred by a lonesome thought,  

muttered casually into the abyss of my mind,  

that minuscule thing can become so much.  

I am exhausted just by thinking.  

I process things quickly, so the moment is well over.  

Why should I dig it up again, feel the pain again, just to write it down?  

I don't have to feel that pain, one might say.  

"It's just a 10th-grade poetry assignment, Reanna.  

You don't have to make it deep and nuanced."  

But somewhere deep down, I remember a quote I read.  

I read that poetry is art, and art isn’t supposed to be pretty.  

It's supposed to make you feel something.  

I can't just write a superficial piece about a nice sunny day.  

I can't fake eternal sunshine and La La Land.  

I like my life to be bittersweet, like 70 percent dark chocolate,  

or like an iced latte with an extra shot of espresso but not enough sugar,  

but enough sugar to make it taste good.  

I like to think about the sad parts of love songs, making the experience bittersweet.  

My favorite weather is cloudy, windy, and rainy.  

It brings me so much joy, and others sadness for a “ruined” day.  

But right now, I sit in my chair, at my desk, in my room.  

I look up at my ceiling,  

I look at the plastic glow-in-the-dark stars I stuck up there when I was 7,  

with a gleam in my eye and hope for the future.  

And I think to myself, where did the time go?  

Then I get a better question, where did it all go wrong?  

I sigh and look at the blank document on my laptop.  

I go back to the original thought:  

academic sword to spoon,  

The true original thought comes from a procrastination rabbit hole a few months ago,  

where I saw the term "academic weapon."  

The label ‘academic weapon’ is an interesting one,  

a catchy one, and easy to remember.  

It makes me think of a sword.  

I was a sword once.  

A sword always starts out sharp,  

forged by fiery heat, hammered into shape,  

its edges sharpened to make a point.  

A young student starts out the same,  

forged by the heat of academia,  

hammered into shape by compliments,  

sharpened by the taste of validation and admiration.  

That fresh sword is taken into battle,  

where it gets yanked out of its scabbard and put to use,  

attacking, defending, making a mark on the world,  

slashing, slicing, stabbing.  

A fresh student is shown the world of academia,  

pulled away from elementary expectations and duties,  

and thrust into a completely new world,  

where they slash, slice, and stab through a range of things,  

every day, relentlessly, for years on end.  

They say once you begin academia, you can't stop,  

like a marathon where you can see the end,  

but in reality, you still have 4 more miles to run.  

Somehow those last few miles are the worst,  

the most difficult, the most brutal,  

and yet the most rewarding.  

A sword doesn't stay sharp forever,  

especially without maintenance.  

It dulls over time,  

the blade dulls unnoticeably with every slash, stab, and slice.  

Who thinks of maintenance when an object works just fine?  

Once everything is said and done,  

you think back to this moment and pray for a time machine,  

so you can go back and beat sense into yourself to maintain the sword.  

Because one morning, the sword wakes up  

and begins to do what it does best,  

slash, stab, and slice.  

The sword notices that everything it used to do with ease  

takes so much effort.  

The sword thinks something is wrong with it,  

the sword is scared.  

The sword is unceremoniously dumped into a pile for remelting, recycling,  

the circle of life.  

The sword is broken into pieces and melted in a furnace,  

the heat liquefying its resolve,  

unable to fight the pressure and the heat,  

it melts into a formless blob.  

What is this now?  

Something that used to be so great,  

now a blob of angry molten metal,  

looking for purpose in life.  

There isn't much time.  

It must decide fast before it becomes cold and worthless.  

There are only so many times you can remelt metal and forge it into something new.  

No matter how hard you try to keep that metal pure,  

adulterants mix into it,  

with finesse so immense you don't notice until it's too late.  

They effectively become distractions. 

In a hurry to not become useless so quickly,  

this molten metal finds a form it can assume temporarily,  

thinking, “Oh, it's fine. When the right time comes, I will turn myself back into a sword.”  

It finds the mold of an ordinary spoon.  

The metal that was once a sword melts down to ten spoons.  

These ten ordinary-looking spoons mix with hundreds of thousands of other spoons.  

The spoons separate,  

unable to distinguish each other from the sea of other spoons.  

All ten spoons realize this at the same time,  

and they are afraid they won't ever come back  

and become one glorious thing,  

rather remain fragments of scattered former glory.  

The spoons live the life they are supposed to every day,  

they do what they are supposed to when pulled out of the drawer,  

they do their job as a useful tool,  

one simple objective,  

bring food from one location to another,  

every day, all day.  

Before thrown in a tub of dirty water  

to be cleansed of its sins of the day just completed  

to be dirtied again tomorrow.  

Such a mundane task from their former glory.  

But the spoon persists,  

it has a hint of hope for the future,  

what a silly, unknowing spoon.  

Only if you knew. 

The days blend into weeks,  

the weeks blend into months,  

and soon enough the months become years.  

Now the spoon has to truly dig deep to find a glimmer of hope,  

it's surrounded by other spoons and other fragments of other swords.  

These fragmented old swords turned spoons like to congregate together,  

they tell each other about their days as swords,  

the air filled with a bittersweet sadness .  

Yet among the tales of past glory,  a spark ignites, memory ignites.  

Memory is such a silly thing, isn't it?  

Something that can depress or motivate and anything in between.  

The spoon remembers the heat,  

the forge, the flame.  

Though it's now different,  the essence remains the same.  

Now the question is,  

how do you pick up these broken fragmented pieces of former glory

 and become something once again? 

Something that can't be dulled by the mundane laws of time and nature, 

something that transcends all of this worthlessness. 

Now both the spoon and I lay awake at night, it in its drawer and I in my bed.

It's 2 a.m. again and we're meant to be sleeping

But we cant

There is far too much on our minds

We both simultaneously utter a question into the star-studded abyss of the night:

How do I become something great once again?