Lilly

I give myself a day. I have tests and interviews and presentations staring me down from the days to come but I tell them to wait, I sacrifice 24 hours to forget them. I throw open the windows to my dorm room because the air outside feels like spring and I leave music playing in my room, quiet, even when I walk to the grocery store for breakfast and frugal weekly supplies, or while I’m trekking up and down countless flights of stairs to do laundry. I go to the campus gym and load more weight onto a barbell than I’ve touched since my ankle surgery in 2015 and throw that around until I can’t anymore, all in some vague hope that maybe the soreness will keep me at my desk in the coming days. I take a shower, fold my laundry, make my bed, scrub the sink. Play adult for a little while even as I’m ignoring my academic responsibilities. The master of productivity sans focus.

Maybe it’s dangerous to take these days. I never see my friends doing anything similar—they attack their responsibilities head on. Weekends are time to prepare for what’s to come. They chunk out their downtime—let’s go get dinner somewhere, I watched a whole episode of something on Netflix today, but I got in a couple hours of work even before breakfast! That doesn’t seem to compute for me. I’m either fully on or (almost) off.

It’s my own kind of mindfulness. I don’t stop myself from thinking about my classes or even worrying about them—I let the thoughts enter and pass. I have my epiphanies in the shower and scribble them down back in the room with my hair still wet, bits of code or questions for a professor. But there are hours in between to read anything I want, to dance barefoot on our shoddy carpet, to lie in bed and let my eyes unfocus when I don’t have the energy to do anything else. Because that happens, too—they aren’t always happy days.

My friends go to house parties and come back forlorn. “Everyone’s just there to get drunk,” they say.

“I’ve heard that’s the point,” I tell them.

Escapism comes in different forms. I don’t know if mine is healthy. It seems strange to me that I can go from such engaged, exciting work to total detachment at the flip of a switch. But it’s worked for me thus far. I take a day and when the next one dawns I find it in myself to focus again. Until that fails, catch me with the windows open like it’s April. ♦