It doesn’t take long to be kicked out of your major.
It comes in emails, it comes in warnings, it comes in broken promises to the computer science department’s last academic counselor for last names A-Li, and then it comes in crashing GPAs and academic probation contracts crumpled up next to shredded diary entries and ditched finals and silence filled by tinnitus whenever anyone is obliged to ask how you are.
The paperwork is embarrassing—getting whatever mental illness diagnosis is needed to justify dropping out of college (technically “academic leave” in case I wanna come back), as if an alternate healthy version of myself would’ve survived. That’s not my story, but for tuition refund reasons, it has to be. I have to sign myself off from the university’s financial aid office now that I’m no longer a student, then I also have to be dismissed as a patient from the student health center, then I also have to entertain the notion that I can still return to university within four years as long as I choose a different (implied: easier) major. Then, I also have to fake going to classes so my roommates don’t ask questions that aren’t their business. Then, I have to subtly change my Instagram bio to get rid of my university’s name, expected graduation year, and major. Then, I have to find my passport and rake up enough part-time cash to change my name and start over in a new country.
It doesn’t take hours of academic counselor appointments discussing my “options”. It doesn’t take three quarters of failed classes to be kicked out of my major. It doesn’t take a lifetime of gifted kid burnout.
It takes one conversation at dawn, sitting at a window in a room with dull green walls where the door always has to be a crack open, where your socks have speckles of rubber on the sole for floor grip, where you can’t know where your roommate lives, where your only taste of outside is through the ochre sunlight filtering into an East-facing window from lush green weeping willow trees in front of the building, where your shoes can’t have shoelaces:
“It’s finally quiet.”
“Yeah.”
But the echoes of this conversation ring in my cochleas louder than my professors’ microphones and the long cobalt shadows of that morning extend farther than my ego. That was the last time I knew quietude, but my mind cannot conjure the lacuna before that conversation—only the resonance afterwards, those reverberations that quiver in my coronary arteries like a bursting blood clot. My lacrimal glands have ruptured, too, and what used to be tears is now flood-water filling my lungs, enough to keep an arc afloat. I can hear my old roommate’s voice, it’s frozen in twangy pre-pubescence, but not the millisecond of air that had to push through her vocal cords to vibrate her words out.
And the twittering of songbirds, but not the wing flaps that brought them to the weeping willow branches.
And the dripping of dew on the grass below, but not the water vapor from the frigid night before.
And the cries of a newborn, but not the ultrasound’s fetal heartbeat.
It will take hours of listening to good advice and ignoring it anyway. It will take four years of never returning to college. It will take a lifetime of embarrassing paperwork.
Then, maybe after that, I could finally find the dawn’s silence anew in eternal twilight.