Afloat, Ashlyn Lee ‘20

The Divide — Wendy Buendia ‘20

What Do We All Cry For?

I woke up in a haze that Sunday morning. It was sunny out, and natural light streamed in through my bedroom windows. The weather was nice but average, nothing special. I remember feeling incredibly uncomfortable waking up. I had fallen asleep with my makeup on from the night before, so I could feel clumps of dark, dried eye makeup glued to the corners and creases of my large, blue eyes. My hair was dirty - but not the first-day kind of dirty that you can live with. It had to have been at least the third day, and my thick curls had been up in a bun all night. Short flyaways stood on top of my head in every direction that morning, as if an electric current had been shot right through me. I climbed out of bed and stood up, only to be greeted by a truckload of dizziness and a migraine spiraling right between my eyes. The headache had been there for weeks. I mostly didn’t notice it except in the mornings, and at night when my medicine wore off, and sometimes when I forgot to eat. I didn’t have room in my brain that morning to deal with a headache, so I quickly shoved it aside and in the corner, filing it away in a cabinet in the deep depths of my thoughts. My thoughts are tricky like that sometimes. I like to imagine my brain like a huge gas molecule, and my thoughts are all of the electrons and protons and neutrons shooting around inside of the molecule at extremely high speeds, eventually colliding with each other and the walls of the molecule, bouncing off and starting again. I think a lot for someone who quite often does things without thinking. My mom likes to tell me that I don’t think, and this is not true under any circumstance. I do think, in fact, quite a bit actually. I think about girls and boys and friends and not friends and food and sports and school and others and myself. I think about myself a lot - not that I’m selfish, which I probably am, but I think an unusual amount about things I say or do - or things I haven’t said or done. I’m not entirely sure why this is - in fact, I have thought a lot about that as well. Anyway, I had been thinking probably more than it was healthy to do that morning, so much that I could feel my head begin to implode, causing an aching pain directly under my hairline. It was May, and school was almost over, and finals were coming up, and it seemed like teachers were pounding us with all the work we didn’t do earlier in the year, as if they just wanted us to mentally, physically, and emotionally crumble by the end of the year. My brain was boiling over with dozens of pointless things that the world wanted so badly for me to care about. Most things I heard seemed stupid, and most of the things I was told to do seemed pointless. This made my physical tiredness from lack of sleep and lack of motivation to do most anything required in my life even worse. School, at this time, did not seem like a basic part of life - it was a dreadful chore that I became quite skilled at getting