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A Contest of Discipline with a Frog (And My Utter Defeat)

I am not a man of nature. I do not rise at dawn to greet the sun, nor do I feel the need to press my palms into the dirt to remind myself I exist. No—I am a man of books, of dimly lit rooms, of Uber Eats deliveries placed with mechanical precision. My life, carefully curated, revolves around the written word. Or at least, the idea of it.

But there is a certain irony in being a writer with nothing to write about. My room—four blank walls, a questionably green ceiling—offers me no great revelations. It is merely a container for my inaction, a witness to my self-inflicted solitude.

And so, on a particularly uninspired afternoon, I did what any desperate man would do.

I left my room.

The world outside was unchanged. The trees, tall and indifferent. The sky, stretching far beyond my comprehension. The wind, cool against my skin, though uninterested in my presence. I walked, hoping for something, anything, to spark within me the embers of inspiration.

An hour passed. Then another.

I saw birds. A woman jogging with her dog. An elderly man reading on a bench. All of it… fine. All of it deeply, excruciatingly unremarkable.

At last, resigned to my failure, I sat by the lake. I watched the water ripple, listened to the soft rustling of the reeds, tried to convince myself that at the very least, this was peace.

And then, I saw him.

A frog.

Neither large nor small. Neither vibrant nor dull. A simple, gray-green creature, parting the grass with unhurried ease.

He stopped.

I stopped.

And thus, the game began.

At first, I did not think much of it. It was merely an oddity, this little creature staring at me as if we were equals. But then, as the seconds stretched into minutes, I began to realize—this was a test.

A battle of will.

A contest of discipline.

I could not move.

I would not move.

The frog—whom I named Jermaine, because something as stubborn as this deserved a name—remained still. His bulbous, unblinking eyes locked onto mine with an intensity that felt almost personal.

I would not be the first to break.

Time passed.

My legs ached, folded beneath me in a position that had long since ceased to be comfortable. My back screamed, urging me to shift, to stretch. The sun dipped lower in the sky. Joggers came and went, glancing at me with curiosity, then concern, then outright confusion.

Still, I did not move.

Jermaine did not move either.

A war of attrition.

Minutes stretched into what felt like an hour.

I thought, perhaps, he was testing me. That I was on the precipice of something grand, something profound. I imagined, briefly, that Jermaine was not a mere frog but some ancient being, a test sent by god to see if I was worthy of the stories I so desperately sought to write.

My limbs burned. My throat was dry. The hunger in my stomach was a distant thing now, drowned out by sheer determination.

And then—disaster.

A moment of weakness. A flicker of impulse.

It was instinct, nothing more. Something more akin to a twitch, an absent-minded attempt to document the absurdity of my predicament. And in that instant—Jermaine moved.

Like a shadow breaking free, he sprang toward the lake, disappearing into the reeds with an ease that made my struggle feel laughable.

For a moment, I felt victorious.

But then—

A thought. Unbidden. Unshakable.

What if he thought he had won?

What if, in his cold, amphibian mind, I had faltered first?

What if I had moved, and to him, that meant surrender?

The weight of my defeat settled heavy in my chest.

I had a contest of discipline with a frog.

And I f**kin lost.

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