Procrastinatus (the Minor Deity of False Comfort)

All I wanted, to begin with, was sleep. Friends’ phone calls would be ignored, their text messages unanswered. I fought off invitations to parties with flimsy excuses. “I’m exhausted,” I would cry. “I promise I’ll attend the next one.” I would read their concerned emails, but didn’t know how to reply. I didn’t feel as though I could compose my thoughts, or maybe it was that I didn’t feel like trying. “I’ll do it later,” I would say, closing the tab in my browser.

One by one, my friends dropped from my life. Was this my choice? I can’t quite tell.

I did not limit this to mere electronic correspondence. Leaving things till later is a darkly sinister haze that has completely pervaded all areas of my life. I pledge to myself to write, write, write, and I never do. I was far too slow after high school to seek a career for myself, and though I did eventually make a move to change this five years later, I am now stuck in a university I detest, studying things that I care less for every day, surrounded by teenagers who I am too old to have anything in common with. I ward away would-be friends whose hands offer to pull me out of the darkness.

I am a slave to Procrastinatus, the god of the ease found in forever postponing that which frightens me.

He appeared to me first as a friend, a reprieve from the accumulated stresses that threatened to tear me apart. “You don’t need to work so hard,” he had said, slitheringly. “Allow yourself a day of rest, for you can always attend to your duties tomorrow, or even next year.” His touch felt so liberating, his words so comforting, that I, staring right into his face, could not admit to myself what an ugly creature he was.

Now I am bound to him, and he leers at me in each of my waking moments. Procrastinatus’ voice is the lullaby that sings me numbly to sleep. He has taken in another follower whose struggles against his reins are always left until tomorrow. I am deflated, a shell defined only by her slavish devotion to Procrastinatus.

But, like a slave, I dream fleetingly of escape. The lies he has fed me, the bonds that hold me here – they are thin as paper. I could change all of this today. But why bother? I could do that tomorrow, next week, next year.