You wake up one morning feeling the weight of the world, or the weight of your world. Maybe it was a dream that made your eyes snap open, made your heart sink, but you can’t remember. It’s your first time being rested in days, but you don’t feel rested.
You haven’t been taking care of yourself the way you promised you would this semester, and not just with the whole sleeping thing. Your kickboxing gloves still lie, dusty and cold, in the back seat of your car. You only have microwave dinners and you aren’t reading the library books that promise escape or introspection or both.
You are writing, though, I’ll give you that. You’ve produced an impressive amount of pages in a short amount of time, pages in your journal, pages in the word processor, more files than you can count on two hands, but at this point, sometimes, you feel like you’re just going around and around in circles, as sad music plays and you’re forever swiping left past the faces of Central New York men who couldn’t interest you less.
You are also seeing your friends here more often. That’s big, you remind yourself, these late-night conversations and round-table dinners and coffee-shop confessionals. It’s more than last semester. Maybe you’ll be sad to leave Syracuse after all, 100 days from now.
You have been rising in the ranks. Your name is attached to more projects and known to more people. The future is still hazy, but there is a distinguishable hue to it now. You don’t say, “I don’t know” anymore when people ask you what the plan is after graduation.
But you wish you cared a little more about what is happening here than about what you’ve left behind. You spent so much of your winter break dreading the return, only to find yourself displaced in the places you’d once called home. A lot can happen in five weeks, and a lot did happen in five weeks.
Melancholy can be a comfort when you can see the arc of loss and tell the story and point to a specific person or event, to a before and after, and you can almost believe in the healing passage of time. But that nameless lethargy, with no beginning or end in sight, is less sexy. Depression has no juicy details. It is the difference between felt pain and the absence of feeling, between the past and the present, between being awake and asleep.
It is winter in America’s snowiest city, and you are awake and asleep.