I’m pretty sure I’ve forgotten how to study. I mean, I haven’t even tried it since last June. It’s scary for me, bookworm extraordinaire. It’s scary for everyone who knows me. I just don’t feel like studying, though.
I always thought college would be this heaven on earth. Interesting people and exciting opinions, riveting lectures on Europe’s political climate, a challenge. But it’s just plain boring. The students are conceited and self absorbed, hardly inclined to learn but always up to showing off. Others are just there, somehow already resigned to their fate, a fate that closely resembles the previous three years of high school where your instincts of survival altered to scream READ instead of BREATHE.
What happened to the promise of an actual life after years of excruciating study? I always thought it was okay to neglect my social life as long as I made sure I got into the university I wanted. After that, I always thought that things would be easier. But how do you escape years of suspended existence? Is it even possible?
How do you heal from the scars of a self imposed exile? I spent the last two years of high school hardly talking to any of my class mates, except maybe to borrow a pen. I even stayed inside the classroom during breaks because I had no one to talk to. Not that anyone noticed. Or cared.
It was feeling so invisible that had me thinking of suicide. I used to wonder how long after I died someone would think to ask one of the teachers. How long it would take for them to realize that not one of them actually knew the quiet and withdrawn girl that was top of the class. Would someone feel guilty realizing that they could have helped? That maybe by trying to get to know me they would have made a difference in whether I lived or died?
But that hardly matters now. I know I am too wary of pain to actually try. Unless it becomes convenient. I have prescription pills, but I am afraid they are rather mild, and I would wake up in the hospital with tubes coming out of me and my stomach recently pumped. God, I hate hospitals. They serve as an unwelcome reminder of the most appalling limitations of mortality; for me it’s hardly death, but rather the unavoidable decay of the flesh and modern society’s constant need to postpone it- indefinitely.
