I was severely dehydrated and in need of a real meal. I was living on apples I stole from the dining hall weeks beforehand and cookies I took impulsively from the dorm common rooms when I was overwhelmingly hungry. I didn’t want to let myself binge on the treats, but when my stomach was talking, it was hard to control, which is still an issue that haunts me. I was dehydrated because my dorm did not have a water fountain and I was not going to drink lukewarm water to quench my thirst. The only beverage I was consuming was black coffee from the coffee maker I had in my dorm room. I used Starbucks Sumatra with the bathroom tap water because it was going to boil anyway. I wasn’t living in poverty or hiding out, I just did not want to be seen by fellow students outside the classroom. They weren’t cruel; they were quite kind, but there was nothing beyond that. I wanted more than just small talk with people and that layer had yet to be discovered in my two-month-stay thus far. I hated small talk, I never had anything to say. The weather was cold and the dining hall food was terrible, what more could I say to people I barely knew?
Due to my mission of avoidance, I woke and worked at odd hours to still produce decent grades. I was up by 5 AM but went to sleep at 6 PM. After sleeping until midnight, I would do my homework and watch psychological thriller movies until I was too tired to keep my eyes open. The only interaction I had for almost twelve hours was with the housekeeper for my floor while I went to get tap water for my coffee. These hours were strict and I almost never saw any people on my floor.
After finishing homework from the night before, I prepared for my one cigarette a day and walked towards the town center. The town center consisted of office buildings, a hair salon, the college bookstore, some restaurants, a coffee shop, a tower movie theater, and a deli that I frequented to steal zero-calorie, flavored drinks. There was a tiny gazebo in front of the college bookstore where I hid in front of while facing the intersection across the street. As a result of hibernation, I would think the whole town was judging me for smoking a cigarette, but not a single person was looking my way. Facing the bookstore from the gazebo, Sufjan Stevens echoed through my wired earbuds. I pretended the music was uplifting. I have never liked upbeat and optimistic music. However, I have been told that constantly listening to sad music will just make me more depressed. I suppose I wanted to hate my life. I convinced myself that Sufjan Stevens’ album A Beginner’s Mind was an ode to my joyfulness. There I was, sitting on my knees, smoking a Marlboro Red, listening to “Olympus” by the king of darkness.
Everyday was the same. For two weeks that semester I had been severely ill, hardly leaving my bed for four days. I sat in my room watching Black Swan on repeat while attempting to breathe through inflamed airways. In a strange way, I was grateful for that illness because I had an excuse for not leaving my room. I didn’t have to make a fake excuse to the people I barely knew that asked to hang out on social media. I hated Instagram and Snapchat for these reasons and wound up deleting them a few days into my forced seclusion that fall semester.
When I started to recover from the cold, I set out in search of ways to occupy myself. Having a cold that severe distracts me from any thoughts of the outside world and I have the ability to just sleep my pain away. I started seeing movies alone in the town center. For two hours I could at least try to think about something else. I saw French Dispatch by Wes Anderson five times.
My dehydration was catching up with me and I felt dizzy getting up from my bed, so I tried to avoid going to the bathroom as much as possible. I took a bite from a mushy apple on top of my desk and thought about texting my friend from home. I decided against it because she had asked for distance and I am too afraid of being a burden to people. The downfall of our friendship was an issue on my part since I hated being alive and she did not know how to help me anymore. I figured she was tired of my bullshit and moved on a long time beforehand. I knew she was done with our friendship but I still felt like there was some aspect to attach myself to. As much as I try not to believe in hope, I fall for its lies every time. Still a part of me believes we will be friends again one day, but then again, I don’t see an end to my unhappiness.
The disintegrating apple seemed to be enough for my limbs to hold me up for the morning. It was the most dreaded time of the semester: friends and family weekend. I had asked my family in passing to come; however I assumed the journey to be too arduous and would rather pass on the complaints from my siblings and father. Instead of joining in the festivities of the weekend, I decided my time would be best spent away from campus. I looked up the bus schedules from East Hastings to Southaven, scanning my screen for the most immediate escape. It was 10:21 AM, the nearest bus was already eight minutes away, so I threw on my Blundstones and left my dorm room with the television and fan on. As usual, the tennis channel was playing since there was 24-hour coverage of matches all over the world. I grabbed my busted, eight-year-old mucus green backpack from the corner, disregarding the fact that I should have emptied it from the day before of all of the books I had stolen from the library. I locked the door behind me and retreated from the hidden staircase at the end of the hallway in a sneaky rush. Locking my door became a habit after one of the other students on my floor began entering my room while I was not there to leave her food in my fridge. Most of my efforts in seclusion could be chalked right up to my fear of confrontation with this fellow student. I did not see her for the rest of the semester after she attempted several times to knock on my door while I pretended to be asleep.
After exiting the hidden staircase to the hilly landscape of East Hastings, I walked with the utmost intent of avoidance to the closest bus station. The station was simply a sign on the side of the road with no sidewalk attached, in between the brutalist architectural education building and the colossal structure of the biology labs. It was 10:26 AM. I had three minutes to spare, maybe more since the bus could almost be guaranteed to be late everyday.
Inside my pocket, I pulled out my wired earbuds and plugged them into my phone to lay a soundtrack to my day. I began to play a playlist, appropriately named after my favorite poem. The poem, written by my favorite poet, had been the reason I applied to the school I was at in the first place. There had to be a reason for the poet’s greatness and I was in search of it.
The bus had arrived one minute late full of international students on their way to Tinder dates and study sessions. I sat down at the nearest open seat to avoid interaction with anyone else. After passing the other stops on campus, the bus was on its way to the next college eight miles away. Watching the landscape of the rural countryside fade into suburban homes, I longed for any outlet to saltwater. There were vast expanses of dirt road and dairy farms but no sign of a sandy oasis in sight. The bus rode over potholes and shrank through the narrow, curvy roads into wooded sections and out through brown fields. Then there it was. The Connecticut River prevailed through the battle of push and pull on the hilly terrain and the bus drove over the body of water. As much as I wanted to feel the comfort of the Connecticut River flood into me, I couldn’t. There was nothing stopping me from enjoying the view, but there was a lack of ease. The river was still unknown to me, we had not grown together over time. I had only just met her and she was freshwater.
This was typically how my experience on the bus would go, shuffling in between the same songs and blending into the world outside the windows. When the bus arrived in Southaven, I got off at the first stop, knowing well that I still had a ten minute walk into the shopping center of the town. I figured I needed to get some more walking in to justify the apple I had before.
I had no plan or agenda, just a need to escape. I walked past several middle-aged women’s clothing stores and quirky cafes that offered the same drink options as most cafes. Once I reached the center of Southaven, marked by an old courthouse building turned into an Urban Outfitters, I made my way towards the first used bookstore in my path. The bookstore was off a downward sidewalk. Outside the storefront a bargain cart was unattended, and inside books were piled high from floor to ceiling. There was a singular table of new books that I scanned but lost interest in once I found nothing eye-catching. I became disinterested quickly, as if I could no longer form meanings in relation to words. These books stared me down from every vertical and horizontal surface, begging me to express any desire to move within them. I felt myself split in half, but the conscious part of my brain could not mend the gap. The other part of myself was trying desperately to unite again, to see those objects beyond their structure of phrases. But this side of me was submerged in carelessness, gasping for air and losing sight of their purpose as she could not convince the dominant part. There was no reason to grasp for straws when the opposing side had no interest in the argument being made. To comprehend those objects would mean to understand the value for me. My dominant part that smothered its counterpart to a lonely death had no significant attachment to the objects stacked from floor to ceiling.
Suddenly, a shattering sound ruptured my thoughts. I saw a wound bubbling with blood on the inside of my forearm. The rush of physical pain enthralled me and I searched for the culprit. As I raised my eyes from my arm to the broken glass that seemed to be radiating around me, I saw, just outside the storefront window, a figure in rags, bare feet invaded by the cracked skin of old age and hard wear. The figure was an older white man in tears. He dropped the rock of an attempted second hit and fell to his knees, dragging the cart of sale books down with him.
His tears were those of exhaustion, without real reason. “I have nothing” he seemed to be murmuring behind the cascade of warped reflections. I stared at him as the chaos ensued around me. Employees calling the cops, customers running to the exit but avoiding any possibility of eye contact with the man, and people trying to keep away from the broken glass as if a physical wound would have damaged them more.
I kept staring.
No part of me tried to understand why. What was stopping me from throwing the rock back at him, putting him out of his misery? Part of me wanted to drown this man as well, not maliciously, but as a favor. The blood began to tickle as it dribbled down my arm and onto the ground. The warm feeling of the fluid turned as cold as the New England breeze coming through the debris.
I wasn’t trying to understand the homeless man because I understood all too well.
What I couldn’t understand was why I felt nothing.