One Mark

The Rabbit thought it was lazy.

That was the word it had for all of it.
The lateness.
The essays left until the edge.
The terms of notes untouched until the final night.

Lazy was the simplest explanation, and the cruellest, and the one the Rabbit believed.

It got good grades anyway.
This confused the story rather than fixing it.
A lazy animal should not have done well, and the Rabbit did well, and so the laziness had to be a kind of waste.
A squandering.
Proof of how much more there would have been if only the Rabbit had tried properly.

In its final year, the Rabbit came one mark short of a first.

One mark.

It is years later now, and the Rabbit can still feel that one mark.
It can tell you, honestly, that the degree did not matter.
That it opened the door to a single job the Rabbit held for six months, and after that was never asked about again, and meant nothing.
The Rabbit knows this completely.

And still it cannot put the one mark down.

Because the mark was never really about the degree.
It was the last and clearest proof of the thing the Rabbit had always suspected about itself.
So close.
So nearly.
Bright, but inconsistent. Capable, but variable. One mark short, at the very end, when it counted.

It would take the Rabbit a long time to learn what it now half-believes.
That it was never lazy.
That the field it could not cross and the night it could not stop working were not a character flaw but a wiring, the same wiring, seen from its two sides.
That an animal built to wait for the edge will always, sometimes, miss by one mark, and will also do in a single night what others cannot do in a term.

The Rabbit can say all of this now.
It can lay the whole argument out, reasonably, the way it once laid out a revision timetable it would not follow.

And a part of it still believes it was simply broken.

The Rabbit is not sure that part will ever fully leave.
It has made a kind of peace with its staying.
It lets the part speak, and does not always believe it, and that, for now, is enough.