I wake up drowsy and feel the weight of skin sagging underneath my eyes. My eyelids are typically huge but they bulge even more. I feel their puff when I open my eyes wide and the fullness of my tear ducts. It’s a summer day. Morning. Though not hot nor humid like usual. The air is cold and clear, it must have rained. I make breakfast bit by bit. Slice bread I bought at the store yesterday. Cut off a third of an oval of an avocado. Pour hot water over frozen berries, not hot enough. Put them in the microwave for 40 seconds, hot enough.
The last two summers I spent at a language program, where all you do is study. 4 hours of class per day, 3 hours of homework, then you choose a club. It is located on a perfect college campus, perfectly cohesive, perfectly designed to enable Focus, Dedication, Immersion. It is a utopic world, where excellent instructors with PHDs or successful careers in linguistics or the arts go to teach purely for the joy of it – the pay is meager. And the students too are mostly wonderful, extremely dedicated, and each with their own unique impetus to study and a neat CV. They usually fall into categories of aspiration: government, academia, pleasure, the latter which I belonged to last year and in part still do. At some point, I may belong to the one in the middle. And this is due very much in part to this program. Because this is a world I want to stay in, a world where people gleam.
Where I grew up people do not gleam. They tarnish. They break down, largely due to drugs and drink. Вредние привички. Yesterday my best friend brought her baby to visit her family, which I and my dad are a part of. This baby has become a light in a period of heavy and profound darkness. Her cousin ran with the wrong crowd, was shot and killed a few months after the baby was born. Her dad is skinny, which concerns only because we know how he likes pills. Her grandma is in the hospital with dementia, and old people die from grief. Luckily the baby is perfect in every way. And her dad ate 8 popsicles within an hour. We could laugh.
Each time I drive away from this program, I lose it completely. Every aspect of it only exists there. The language, the people, the rhythm and way of life. It is completely divorced from my reality. And I feel motion sick afterward from how quickly I lose one and become swallowed by the other.
Each time I leave it’s like I was never there.
Spoon avocado, spoon heated berries onto bread. Eat. Spoon yogurt onto berries. Sprinkle granola on top. Sip coffee made of crystals. Voila
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