You Are A Student

You are a student. And you are lucky to be here. And you are so exhausted. 

It’s Tuesday.

You wake up before you want to, and later than you should. Your stomach is hurting because you forgot to eat dinner last night. Your alarm is a Noah Kahan song you’ve learned to hate, because it’s what has forced you out of desperately needed rest for the last year and a half. 

“I don’t, I don’t, I don’t wanna”—get out of bed. 

You fell asleep on your homework last night, and now there are lines tattooed on your right arm from cuddling with the hard ridges of your laptop. 

Before Noah so rudely interrupted your slumber, you had been dreaming about having a Theater and Meteorology hybrid class in a Greek ruins site. In the dream, the professor threatened to take attendance off because you went to the bathroom. 

Your morning class is run by a charming instructor who would have counted your grade down by half a letter for being two minutes late, so you drive in today instead of waiting for the bus. All the spots in the hourly pay lot are taken. You take your chances with Parking Services. You speed walk to the classroom, and it’s 85 degrees in late September, and you have to think about global warming some other time, because you have homework. You’re lucky to have a car. You wish you were still in bed.

Sweat sticks your sweatshirt to your back for the next hour and a half while you listen to a lecture about semicolons and “putting in the work.” You and your friend with the popsicle-colored hair look sideways at each other every time the instructor says something condescending. This could be a drinking game.  

Your second class of the day is just simply fine. You take notes on your laptop, and toss down some to-do list items, because your memory is bad, and you probably have ADHD, and those things will fly from your mind immediately if you don’t put them down right now. You hope the teacher doesn’t think you’re online shopping. Every teacher thinks every student is online shopping. 

Someone in that class has a tattoo of a blueberry bush. You still haven’t eaten today. Oops. 

You get a stupid little drink on your way to afternoon lecture, because you’re falling asleep. You were up until two in the morning. You still haven’t eaten. The drink is 16 oz. of overpriced “Suggestion of Pumpkin Flavor.” It gives you a headache right in the spot where, if you were wearing a costume devil headband, the right-side horn would be coming out.  

You have to do trigonometry in your geology lab. You didn’t know you’d have to do trigonometry in your geology lab. The freshman boy with the eyebrow ring who sits at your table snickers when you tell the teacher you don’t understand a calculation. You can’t go to tutoring hours because you have less than two seconds in between classes, your therapy appointment, and work. 

You get an email while speed walking back to your car. You’re being charged $500 for your last doctor’s appointment. You don’t know why. Your insurance was supposed to cover it. You put it in the notes app beneath thirteen other checklist items: figure out medical charge.

Your breath tastes bad. Your gums have been bleeding when you floss. You have to fit the dentist in somewhere, because you haven’t been in over a year (sue you), so you’ll be late to a class on Wednesday. You’ll pay out of pocket for the appointment, because your insurance doesn’t cover dental. It barely covers death. 

While you do therapy from your car, you watch the parking ticket tucked under your windshield wiper flapping in the gusting wind like a toddler trying to wiggle from their mother’s arms. It looks like rain. It’s Colorado, so the storm will last about twelve minutes. 

When you get home, with just under three and a half minutes allotted to change into your work clothes before running back out the door, you realize that your cat has inexplicably had an accident on the floor. It smells bad, and your roommates are trying not to be frustrated about it. One of your plants is dying. For no reason. You don’t have time to clean the mess up before running out to work. You don’t have time to eat. 

You pay the parking ticket with your credit card while at stoplights on the way to work (sorry to your driving instructor from six years ago), and you hear someone’s persuasive, commanding voice saying, never leave a balance. Never let your score go down.  

Work is $16 an hour. You drive an hour just to get there and back. You were only scheduled for a two-hour shift. It’s not nearly enough, but you need that $32. While there, a little boy’s mom says he can’t get a pink tea set. “That’s too girly,” she says. He puts it back with small hands and lowered eyes. “I knew she would say that,” he tells you blankly. And you see a platform taking shape beneath his sneaker-clad feet that he will have to work to dismantle in therapy later on. You can’t say anything to the mom, so you just smile at him. He tries to smile back. 

You listen to a ghost stories podcast on the drive home, but you don’t hear it. 

You’re thinking about your geology midterm and eating an ice-cream bar when you get back to the house and how impending doom lives in your phone in the shape of war, and donkeys, and elephants, and the Lorax’s satanic cousin. 

Instagram tosses a “realistic college morning routine” reel at you as you’re getting into bed. It’s a girl in a big t-shirt with clear skin. You have four pimple patches on. The shirt makes her look small, because her shoulders don’t fill it out. She wakes up five hours before her first class to make peanut butter toast and a shake. She works out in the morning, and she doesn’t make the bed, and she laughs at herself about it, and her sheets are clean, and they match her comforter. She writes her notes on her iPad with an Apple pen and the handwriting of the popular girl who was extra nice to you in middle school. 

Your brain feels like it’s been gingerly stuffed with cotton. You have to respond to six emails. Follow up? your inbox asks you about the two you haven’t responded to in three days or more. 

Your cat is against your left ankle, and the spaghetti you ate for dinner feels heavy in your gut. You ate too much in one go, because you were utterly starving when you got home. 

You read someone’s story from your morning class to fall asleep, and it reminds you why you like creative writing. Canvas tells you that you got a good grade on your last journalism assignment. Someone on Reddit posts an essay on each miniscule, violet-colored reason they want to marry their girlfriend, and it sits on your mind shelf next to the image of those breaking news headlines that come up on your lockscreen from The New York Times. 

As you are falling asleep, your phone lights up with a message from your sweetie, and your chest smiles. 

How was your day, Goose? 

Oh, just fine, sweetheart—

You plan on doing it all again tomorrow.

• burnout
• college
• day in the life
• student life
• young adulthood