Chronically Punctual

Penelope Pratt was born three weeks early and never forgave herself for it.

Her mother liked to say that Penelope didn't arrive into the world — she checked in. From her first day of kindergarten to her last day at work before retirement (which she planned down to the minute), Penelope had never been late. Not once. Not for a bus, not for a meeting, not even for a meteor shower that peaked at 3:17 a.m. on a Tuesday.

Her punctuality was not casual; it was chronic.

When she was a little girl, her parents taught her that "being on time is the purest form of respect." Her father, a retired Air Force mechanic, used to set all the household clocks five minutes ahead — and then Penelope set her watch five minutes ahead of that, "just in case." As a teenager, when other girls were experimenting with eyeliner and irony, Penelope was experimenting with synchronizing her alarm clock to Greenwich Mean Time.

By adulthood, she had become a legend among her friends. When she made plans, she would always give a friendly warning:

"Just to let you know, I'm chronically punctual."

Her friends would laugh — until the day they arrived at a restaurant ten minutes "early" and found Penelope already seated, water glass half-full, napkin on lap, and menu committed to memory.

Her punctuality wasn't rigid or judgmental — it was just woven into her being, like her sense of humor or her fondness for lemon tea. But it did cause her some… side effects.

For instance, Penelope occasionally suffered from what she called tardiphobia — nightmares about being late. These dreams were vivid and cinematic. She'd find herself rushing through a labyrinthine airport, running toward a gate that kept moving further away. In one recurring version, she was desperately trying to find a parking spot at her own wedding.

Once, she dreamt she was twelve minutes late to brunch and everyone at the café stood up and slow-clapped while a clock on the wall melted like in a Salvador Dalí painting. She woke up in a cold sweat, clutching her bedside alarm clock like a life preserver.

Still, she embraced her punctuality with good humor. Her therapist had once told her, "You could try being fashionably late once, just to see how it feels."

She tried.

She hated it.

She spent the whole ten-minute delay pacing her hallway, muttering, "This is disrespectful. This is chaos." When she finally walked into the party (nine minutes and forty-seven seconds "late," by her estimate), she was so jittery that her host handed her a drink and said, "Penelope, you look like you've just committed a felony."

And in a sense, she felt like she had.

The funny thing was, her punctuality often inspired others. Her coworker, Jerry, once started setting his alarm earlier just to see if he could beat her to the Monday meeting. He never succeeded, but he did start arriving at work on time for the first time in his adult life. Penelope told him warmly, "You're improving, Jerry. You're only chronically borderline now."

Her friends eventually learned to treat her punctuality as a kind of natural phenomenon — reliable as sunrise. They would invite her to dinner at 7:00 knowing full well to be there by 6:50 if they wanted to catch her before she ordered appetizers "to keep things moving."

Then, one day, something extraordinary happened.

Penelope was invited to a surprise party — her own — and the only way her friends could make it truly surprising was to tell her it started an hour later than it actually did.

So when she arrived at 7:00 sharp, everyone had been waiting since 6:00, whispering and shushing and nervously checking their watches. When she opened the door, balloons popped, and everyone yelled "SURPRISE!"

Penelope gasped.

Then she laughed.

Then she said, "I'm so proud of you all. You were chronically early."

After that night, Penelope relaxed just a little. She began saying, with a twinkle in her eye,

"I'm still chronically punctual — just with a flexible margin of grace."

Her friends swore they even saw her show up two minutes late once. But that might just have been a glitch in their clocks.

Because Penelope? She was right on time. Always.

(This story is donated to the public domain.)