You were still alive while I sat in that classroom. It was shabby, punctuated by wooden chairs with their one-sided arm rests protruding outward to form those awkward little desks. An old blackboard stretched across the front wall and on it the gray-haired professor had scribbled “Time Remaining: 15 minutes”. With a blank exam booklet in front of me, I had my eyes on the trees outside, trying to spot the monkeys, the roundup of my multivariate calculus college experience in the tropics. Come to think of it, staring at trees and spotting monkeys were the only activities I consistently engaged in during my entire first semester of college.
Around me everyone was immersed in integrals and derivatives, but I had given up. Frankly, I hadn’t even tried. I saw no point in dedicating time to any of my first semester classes, the technicalities of demand and supply, consumer and firm behavior, it all seemed senseless to me. It was all especially inane when compared with the raging cellular activity taking place in your brain and occupying my thoughts. So, I stared at trees and failed the calculus exam, my first act of intentional academic negligence. You would have been horrified had you not been losing parts of yourself in the process of dying. I could see, though, that nobody else cared much. My generous financial aid package was left intact because your colleagues and my professors saw to that. “She can’t possibly be able to focus given this horrible situation. It’s a miracle that she only failed one class”. But I could focus and had been very much focusing on something else entirely. And by that I don’t mean the trees or the monkeys.
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