I didn’t sleep the night that Kind died. My heart was simply too shattered from watching him steal the love of my life from me that I spent the last hours he was alive hating him. Hating him thoroughly. There was so much hatred inside of me that I just couldn’t go to bed.
“And I love sleeping more than anything in the world!” I shouted to some poor passerby girl who seemed to just have woken up.
What does someone do when they’re tired, drunk, depressed, horny, and lonely at six in the morning? They think. And thinking takes you to weird places. That morning, my mind took me to an old childhood memory.
My adoptive father always struggled to make ends meet. He was a butcher, and he began his shifts early in the morning, long before the sun would come out. Because of his schedule, he would always drop me off at school three hours before class would start. I used to love getting inside my empty classroom and engulfing myself in the darkness and silence until the first rays of sunshine would stream through the windows, turning the blue hues into orange hues. I loved looking at the empty chairs and desks and hearing nothing but my own heartbeat. It was creepy and eerie, but I always found peace in those moments. I recurrently went back to that scenario in my dreams.
Set, determined, smelly, and inebriated, I stormed into a random classroom, chasing that memory. It felt good to go to class for once, even though I had practically graduated.
Once I arrived, however, instead of finding an empty classroom I could reflect in, I found a classroom filled with professors and directors, and they all seemed furious.
“We’re glad you’re here,” one of them said. “Frankly, we never thought you would actually show up to this appointment.” I couldn’t focus on so many faces being that drunk.
“Well, Memory, let me give it to you straight,” said statistics professor Schwarz, my arch-nemesis who had been praying on my downfall ever since I arrived at university.
“We know you cheated on your bachelor’s exam. We have witnesses and video proof of you using your phone during the exam.”
“Some of your classmates have already snitched on you. You are to blame.”
“You will be expelled from this institution. There are four years of your life wasted in the very last week you could have had. You somehow managed to be the most miserable failure of all your student generation.”
“That is, unless you want to help us eradicate the corruption inside our institution.”
“What?!” I asked, expecting them to explain everything again, but they just continued.
“Memory, we are asking you to snitch,” said director Fischer, my other arch-nemesis. “You tell us three names, and we will only defer you back one year, so you can graduate next year.”
And people wonder why I don’t go to class.
© Diego Ballesteros 2024-05-01