An Open Letter From a Lonely Student

I don’t really know where I’m going with this. It happens to be a rainy day outside, like every day for the past week. The sun begins to set earlier and earlier until it feels like there’s no light to look for when I come out of my workplace at 7 p.m. on a Tuesday. School feels a bit like I’m drowning, like every time I come up for air the waves push me back down again and suddenly everything is blurry and confusing and I can’t tell my left from my right. I can’t remember what I ate yesterday or even this morning for that matter, but I guess I’m keeping myself afloat so that’s all that really matters. 

As much as time is a construct, it is an indisputable fact of the way we live. We live on a schedule. A twenty-four-hour schedule that ticks by every second of every day, without us even thinking. Tick. Tock. Tick. Tock. A few seconds passed by already. Blink. Another one. Time likes to pass us by without our consent, and often the warping of time is where my issue lies. 

Sometimes life feels irreversibly slow like everything is a harrowing journey when really it’s walking five feet to the bathroom and brushing your teeth at 3 p.m. because you stayed up until 6 a.m. the night before and you can’t remember why. Other times it feels a bit like an aching burn, just in the back of your mind, because suddenly the headache that’s growing feels like it lasts a lifetime rather than an hour. 

The times when life moves faster are when I feel the least at ease, even despite the absence of painfully slow times, I somehow can never find a perfect middle. I blink and I missed the last thing my professor said. I blink and I missed the whole lecture. I blink and—suddenly the world has turned on its side. The familiar feeling of water fills my lungs, pressing down until it’s nearly unbearable, but not enough to finish me off. Always at the nick of time, I will come up for air. Some might say I’m a survivor. I say that my body will fight for itself without my mind ever coming to the rescue. 

It’s a curious thing, the fighting spirit the body has to live, to carry out the most complex tasks to form a functioning being. A machine of constant moving parts that never sees the light of day. But at the same time, we’re so mean to our bodies. We obsess, insult and cover up. I recently had an epiphany that liking my body is impossible. There will always be a war going on in my head, from right or wrong, from moral to immoral. I will wave the white flags all I would like, but on a fundamental level, my brain will always have a battle to put up with. 

I would love to say that time heals all wounds. Maybe some, but not all. Time is more neutral, a constant form of reliance except when it’s not.

• letter
• life
• lonely
• open
• student