Despertar

spill

Three of my four final exams were scheduled for the same time, nine o'clock tomorrow morning. When that happens, the registrar scrambles your schedule up so you can take them at all different times (or at the original times, your choice/funeral), and sends you a receipt detailing your new schedule. Because the registrar's job is to do things well in advance, they send the receipt--for May exams--sometime in February.

I lost mine. I have no idea when my rescheduled exams are.

My own fault, like everything else. I turned my apartment upside down, looking for it. I called my mom to see if maybe I left it in my room at her house by mistake. Via phone, I guided her through searching all the stacks of papers, some of them private, in my bedroom. At several points, she got annoyed about things she found in the process. A letter I wrote in tenth grade that had the word fuck in it, a tube of banana-flavored lube I bought last year to give as a bridal shower gift. She yelled into the phone, "I don't like finding these things in your room, Shannon." As if sending her prowling through my personal things was something I just had to do. As if it weren't a choice between that or being totally fucked all week, exams-wise.

I didn't find the receipt, and neither did she. So now I have to get up in five hours, drive to school in the rain, wait in a probably massive line to talk to some detached registrar employee, get a reprint of the receipt I lost. And then, depending on the information contained in said receipt, take between one and three final exams in the space of about ten hours.

And I cut my fingernails too short, and my fingertips hurt when I type.

*

On the bright side, things are good with Justin, currently. Some switch went off in his head and suddenly he's trying. It's outside the norm and I know not to take it for granted, but I'm enjoying it right now. I love him. It sucks, but it's great. He's adorably handsome, eyes that melt at the corners when he smiles. When Imani came to visit, we double dated. Pictures were taken, and maybe you can see them.

We're often awake at three in the morning, when they start showing infomercials for Extenze, and he always tosses off the same faux-joking, secretly insecure comment about how next time they offer a good two-for-one deal, he's going to order a sample and make himself bigger. Then five minutes later he's banging away at my cervix and I actually have to make an effort not to say something that sounds like bullshit flattery. Please don't start taking Extenze, you'd probably kill me. He'd think I was joking, and I wouldn't be.

Ninety percent of the time it's that, he's sweet and handsome and helpful and big, and the sun is turning his arms the color of dark amber, but then the other ten percent of the time, when he's not trying to be good, he's defaulting to bad, and he still has the power to make me cry. Any tears I have left, they're for him, because I am not in the mood to care about school right now.

*

On the ugh side, other interpersonal relationships are making me feel really impotent right now. I had to turn my phone off for a bunch of days in a row because calls from family and friends were pulling my focus, and I missed several chances to talk to Meg, which maybe is why I am feeling this empty, sleepless feeling right now. Imani wanted me to review the personal statement she was using to apply for a teaching assistantship, despite my many reminders that I was studying for exams, and she sent it back to me, this terrible piece of drivel, four times in the space of an hour, till I didn't have a choice but to quit responding to her emails. I told her, I told her I didn't have time, that I had been in the library for nine hours straight and was only taking breaks to pee and cry. I edited it for her, twice, and she didn't fix any of the things I told her to fix, which, no one listens to me, why do I say things? And I can't get it right with Tina, either, I guess because instead of constantly complaining about how law school sucks I should be thanking my lucky stars I didn't follow my passion into a dying industry. Which is what I intend to be doing, or at least being as supportive as possible of a friend who is going through what I honestly know to be adult, difficult things. Except I'm being terrible at it, I want to talk when she doesn't, I forget about the too-soon factor, I don't know how to really be helpful, et cetera.

In addition to feeling wronged that she had to search my slovenly room for something I lost three months ago, my mother has started throwing out all sorts of mixed signals about what my family responsibilities are, right now. It's my position that they should be few and minor, baby steps toward the matriarchal role I'll inevitably have to fill someday, but she's including me in everything now, calling me when she's fighting with my dad, who, let's not even get into how my relationship with him is twisting and writhing under the heat-channeling microscope, wanting me to promise things I have no business promising today. And, Mother's Day again, already? Didn't I just screw this up, like, five minutes ago?

I don't want to think this is what the rest of adulthood feels like, constantly letting myself or someone else down. And did I mention the summer job that's going to murder my last scrap of confidence in my intellect starts two days after my last soul-shattering exam?