“And the first position goes to... Annie Bilal!”

Muffled voices cheering “Annie! Annie!” echoed across the auditorium. Sounds of claps filled the room, and cheerful, merged hooting was all that could be heard. It was an ethereal and dream-like moment, which seemed indescribably amazing!

Suddenly, a very bright light beamed towards me and I went (almost) blind.

The cheering sounds were interrupted by a “Beep! beep! beep!” Yes! It was my alarm. The dream-like moment turned out to be an actual dream. I drowsily reached over to my bedside and smacked the alarm off.

My head was still heavy and my eyes droopy from the all-nighter I tried to pull off last night, but I had eventually dozed off at 3:00 am. Now it suddenly hit me that today was the big day I had been preparing for, for days and weeks! Today was the inter-college annual speech competition at my college, and the nerve-wracking thing was that many colleges were taking part in this competition, which meant a great deal of students and competitors.

So nothing had to go wrong — especially since I was a four-time consecutive winner in debate competitions in my school and college, and the coordinator who selected me had full faith in me to get that gold medal which had eluded the sleep of many like me.

My topic was on World Humanity Day, and I had been changing my wordings, tones and many other aspects of my speech for days, just to get that perfect style and also to meet the strict criteria set by the judges, of course.

I knew that I could not mess up. But little did I know that fate had other plans for me. I had messed up right at the start of my big day. I laid my eyes on the clock mounted right across my bed and it stared back at me as if impatiently waiting for this sloth to wake up.........

© Dawn Young Magazine