Lilly

My roommate says, “What are you looking at?” I jerk in my seat and glance back at her. She says, “You’ve been staring out the window for a while.”

I have no recollection of time passing. I make some meaningless affirmative noise and smile, although I’m sure it looks more like a grimace. The notes I should be studying still sit on my desk, pristine, untouched.

I am happier than I was before I came here. That much is obvious. My mother could tell just by looking at me when she visited me last month. I don’t struggle with managing my time nearly as much as I did in high school; I don’t pick ceaselessly at the skin of my wrists and bite my fingernails raw like I did last summer; I don’t lose time floating in that interminable blankness that was at once a prison and a refuge at my lowest points. Or at least, these are all much rarer than they used to be.

But we all have our days—Sundays tend to be my hardest. Scene: my friends, gleeful over a day free of classes; the commons and main quad, dotted with groups of people studying happily in the unusually warm autumn sun; me, in bed with the blinds drawn, unable to focus, unable to move. Classes start again tomorrow, I tell myself, I am almost there, just let this day pass. I need something to engage with, intellectually, something that will challenge me, but I can’t concentrate on my actual schoolwork, so I sleep, hoping to dream. When that fails, I sit in bed wrapped in blankets and stare ceaselessly without realizing and unnerve my roommate. I am an adult, I turned 18 last week, I can get beyond this. Things will be better so soon. Tomorrow morning. The skin around the beds of my fingernails is cracked, bleeding, but I don’t look at it. It’s just because it’s dry, I tell myself, because winter is coming. I am not who I was last summer. It’s just because it’s dry. ♦