An unknown number slices my lock screen. My limbs feel like they have been borrowed from another body. I collapse as often as primary color,amble arthritic as autumn, but the last thing I expected to come from my misimmaculate curl was a summons to the Dean's office while I sniffle into the stripe on my best friend's shirt, shivering in the local emergency room and appealing the fluorescent lights and fake plants that I'll get to go straight back to dreaming in my dorm room, that my parents will never hear about my hospital visit, that the dean of academic services only called to check in on me, that surely they couldn't consider reprimanding me for having a medical problem, even if I'd missed a couple of classes. I'd come into my own at this school, met and made dozens of friends, cackled bizarre community ghost stories, even attempted to consume the cafeteria food. No, of course I wasn't doing perfectly, but I didn't think I had to. I just needed to do and be good.
I, like anyone else between the ages of eighteen and twenty-two, woke up every morning in a similar yet separate state of denial. While the jejune night nurse scribbles his number down on a sticky note for me and the three friends waiting in my room while the medical staff notes my blue fingertips in blue ink, back on the campus I skipped across cement roses on rainy Tuesdays, my parents and the administrators decided I was not well enough for rigors of collegiate life, not with rigor mortis starting at the mouth.
I didn't cry, not until I peeled my One Direction poster off the wall and watched my best friend cram my closet full of linen and lace into a small suitcase.
This couldn't be happening to me, a good girl with good grades and a hundred hair bows.
It did. I was medically withdrawn for the entire academic year, glaring at every infinitesimal, enervated by the electric combination of undernourishment and nervosa.
Despite a thing such as this, a thing with no simple name, I believed this morning and believe this evening that I am still learning.
