Disclaimer: Fiction

* = thoughts (a.k.a. not spoken aloud)

She sat ignoring integration by substitution, incessantly taking her ring on and off almost seeming as if to jerk off her clammy finger. The tension in her gut was too apparent to give a shit about calculus and the ‘cry-choke’ was crawling up her throat. She made it out into the 100-meter tunnel of a hallway, passing the wall of white male faces, underneath the analyzing fluorescents that grossly illuminate every flaw on her equally white, sickly face.

The hallway’s runway stretched and the edges blackened, resembling an acid trip starting to warp. Walking past students, she pulls at their line of sight with her stare until they look away pretending they didn’t just make eye contact.

*Stop doing that you piece of shit.* Her thoughts usually seem to describe herself poetically in this way.

She descends the stairs in her lopsided, ogre fashion, clenching the railing and thinking about the bacteria filling her palm. She finds her spot uninhabited. In the daily routine fashion, she sits herself down and spreads her stuff across a four-person table naturally, as a decent person does. It's not like one of these equally anti-social insects would sit by her anyways.

Surprisingly, she’s able to transport undivided attention into an essay for an incessantly unimpressed teacher who’s going to tell her that her writing is “fine”. She’d rather be told that it’s dogshit if that description came with some actual advice. The distraction continued until the paper printed and then the gut raged on. But, her face didn’t break, so she walked.

The sky was irritatingly white and burned to look at but harmonized nicely with her irrational, internal melodrama.

*Too many fucking stairs.*

Apparently, everything can still be a tragedy even when there’s not actually anything wrong. *Privileged bitch.*

She had decided she was going to do it. She was going to talk about her fEeLinGs, the shitty ones at least. The ones that emerge from a synthetic dualism specifically to berate her. She never talks about them because sharing makes her want to crawl inside of herself, turning her skin inside out and hiss at those who press. Add to that, the fact that her issues are dirt nothings that will never compare to the suffering of the masses. Suffering is relative except that it’s not.

Nonetheless, her psyche doesn’t give a damn about perspective because she was raised to believe she deserves, so she desires; this makes the privileged really good at playing hide-and-seek with misery. Accompanied by this is a self-complex which stretches so far and wide that even the barista makes her fearfully question if room for cream is actually a respectable decision.

A few weeks ago, and most weeks of her life since then and prior to then, she’d find herself in what she enjoys calling a perpetual state of anxiety. She likes calling it this because she’s pretentiously hyperbolic but in fact, it’s still perfectly accurate.

This in no way makes her some special gal who gets to go around claiming individuality due to a mental state that the vast majority of people have. However, as stated earlier, this hide-and-seek game is able to create a perfectly customized hell for anyone it raptures, despite it being a self-generated mirage or not.

Even in her sweetest moments, the haunting guarantee of loss, culmination, or shame shrivels her tongue with a sour taste. In the darker spans, the sour taste creeps its way throughout her, settling within the organs that are supposed to work for the body's maintenance but somehow contract from her mind's dialogue.

It’s a force that’s completely invisible, intangible, barring any way to simply grasp and extract it like a clown with a handkerchief. It sucks her dry of any vitality, any chance of Eudaimonia, by way of her past, present, and future in order fuel itself and dictates any and all actions.

Free will seems to be up for question, but surely not in these moments, for fear of what could happen lays out her exact cowardly moves or inability to choose. It smells like sulfur; feels like swallowing hair. Insanity arises from the paradox of knowing and the inability to correct. A nauseating circle of fear and blatantly seeing the irrationality cycling back and forth. Is that a circle or a cycle? Are they the same or just similar?

The walk was pretty long. She thinks about her legs getting thinner from it.

*Jesus, shut the fuck up.*

Getting closer she thinks about the obligated attentional sympathy which begins the tectonic shift underneath her face but also makes her giddy. She wants attention but doesn’t want to want attention; new and everlasting contradictions arise with her and the sun each morning. The fun lies in guessing what she'll hate about herself next.

She made it up the final set of stairs and asked if they took walk-ins. The receptionist’s gaze made the girl’s eyebrows crack first. Then, her mouth did that unattractive thing where the corners want to go down but she forces them up, creating an uncomfortably tight, forced lizard smirk.

*Agh reception lady knows, goddamnit.*

“Can you tell me what’s going on?” *No bitch this is a waiting room.*

“Are you having…thoughts?” *Yes, I would like to announce to this entire fucking room that I would like to kill myself at this very moment.*

“No, I was just wondering if you take walk-ins.” The last piece of her expression finally shattered and melted. The receptionist was very kind and watched her cry while scrambling to find an opening for the girl. She left with an appointment for tomorrow knowing full-well that she would cancel.