PERFECT PLACES

Jonathan (3)

For the past few days, I've been finding myself caught in a dream while walking home from class. It feels like I am separated from everyone else around me. The wind pushes my hair up into the sky and I squint to oppose the chilling air. People pass by, usually in large groups along the sidewalk. I walk in the other direction with my eyes elsewhere as they talk amongst themselves. Some days I have to step off onto the road to avoid brushing up against people who are coming straight at me. I don't mind.

I mostly feel weird today because I'm overtired. Whenever I'm overtired, it makes me feel a bit dizzy, and very confused. I'm tired today, and to be honest, I've been tired every single day for the past two weeks. Just a minute ago I had closed my laptop in class, put my coat around both shoulders, and realized I hadn't learned much the entire hour. My mind had been wandering.

When I forget to sleep enough, my brain buzzes for an hour or two while I fail miserably at waking up. Sometimes, it feels like my brain takes over in the morning and chooses to shut down my senses. I forget that I have to hear what my professor is saying, like my ears have fallen asleep. I find that my eyes can be open when I'm tired, but what I'm seeing is completely irrelevant. My thoughts take over and I forget that my senses are really doing anything at all. I find that I do this almost every day.

I haven't written here in three weeks or so. I was here last describing my panic attack that led me into the hallway. I haven't wanted to explain what happened after that, until now.

When I was leaning up against the wall that day, someone did find me. It took another ten minutes or so and I felt horrified as he walked toward me. But not as horrified as I would have felt if it had been someone who I didn't know.

His name was Cole. I knew him from high school. I had been really good friends with him in ninth grade, and we kept in touch during the tenth and eleventh grade. But I didn't really talk to him much in the twelfth grade.

I was on the floor outside of my room that day and I really didn't want one of my floormates to find me and it made me feel really vulnerable. So I ended up unlocking my phone and quickly scrolling through my contacts to figure out who I could call. When I saw Cole's name I knew I had to call him because he was probably somewhere close by on campus and he was the only person at the university that knew me at all.

I was embarrassed to press the call button and I was even more embarrassed when he answered.

I could tell after a few words that I'd just woken him up or that he was hungover. He was very surprised that I was calling him. He told me he would have to go find his stupid phone charger before he could talk more because his phone was at 2% from forgetting to charge it after getting home last night.

I waited, crying. A minute passed, then he came back on the line, groaning a bit, probably from being hungover. Then he said he would be over in five minutes or less.

He found me ten minutes later. I had wiped my eyes by then so that I wasn't crying anymore. I had gone back into my room even though it was still really hot in there, much hotter than it was out in the hall. I only decided to go back into the room because I knew that he was coming soon, so I didn't have to risk other people seeing me any longer.

When he found me, he asked me, very loudly, if I needed him to call campus security. I said no but I thanked him for coming. I could tell that he didn't really know what to say to me because he hadn't seen me in so long, but I also knew that he wanted to talk to me or at least make sure I was okay because he had been willing to run over here to find me.

We ended up talking for longer than I expected we were going to. We caught up with one other, mostly about our summers before coming here and our first few weeks here. I definitely lied to him a lot about what I had been up to for the past few weeks and I just told him vaguely that I had been hanging out with people on my floor and just having a really good time in general. I was honest that I hadn't been to any orientation events though, and he gave me a bit of a weird look because he knows me well enough to know that I would never purposefully miss an event like that, one that I was expected to go to.