Crossed

Chapter 2, Part 2

Weekends she would take two. Weekdays she would take three. They were fifteen milligrams each. This routine was set in stone for 4 semesters so far. Her last year of college and the first year of law school. Now it was fall of her second year and she was still going strong. She swore she didn't experience the negative side effects, assuming that the frigid cold of her depression and anxieties were natural to her being, degrading herself for her "natural" neuroticism.

For some reason she had energy. It usually took the pills plus some espresso to get her thinking. Not today.

It was because of her dream, the singular dream that she remembered from a blur of several, intermingling images and symbols.

Images are symbols. She scribbled that down on her notebook that was on the bedside table. "Are" was underlined several times. She was aphoristic in her thoughts, naturally inclined to create these one liners that held meaning sometimes only in herself. But to become great at something, one begins by doing it for themselves. She was becoming great at it. She felt like Nietzsche, who once bragged that he could write in one sentence what other people are aiming at in a whole book.

She was a pretty consistent writer who categorized her law homework as "writing." She became much more articulate as a result, being able to recite certain opinions on modern and traditional law off the top of her head and needing to argue about them. She was obsessed with her stances on these topics, always, and I mean always, diverting conversation in order to vent her most current thoughts on the subject. She had so much to say. If she wasn't spewing about the newly appointed judge or the latest supreme court hearing then she was talking about the craft of writing as a whole. She needed writing. She enjoyed essays for school. She wanted to be like John Grisham, the lawyer/writer extraordinaire. This would give her the structure of law and essay-like knowledge, while also being able to play through fiction. A double-edged sword.

The romanticized and simple little image that brightened her mind in that moment was a time lapse of a day in the life of her future, legalities in the morning and writing at night, every day, not worrying a bit about success or titles, the hunger of ambition being starved and filled in the realm of the process, the grind, her intense work-ethic needing a vent.

She was always energy deprived, forever in a state of needing more. It took consuming amounts of mental energy to get her work done, and on top of that trying to write every day? She couldn't have enough energy. Her positive emotions were dictated by whether or not she got work done during the day. If the world didn't give her any energy, she wouldn't do anything. And that got her in trouble, maintaining near average grades, not standing out at all academically. She thought it was worth it though, spreading out her time between work and writing in a way that kept her future dreams alive. She was good at it.

Not just good at organizing letters into sentences, good at organizing her time into well-spread out chunks of efficiency, adderall as the base. It was the glue to her stability, the banks of the flowing river of movement and decision, honing in her focus like nothing else, zeroing in on exactly what she wanted, poised to interpret her instinct.

There was a knock on the door. She had no idea who it could be. She bundled up in her bed's cover and shimmied over to the peephole to make sure there wasn't some kind of enemy waiting. It was the internet people coming to fix her internet. It went out last night at around 4PM, in the middle of her session of work. She had forgotten. A sigh of relief when she disconnected her eye from the glass hole in the door. Unhinging the doorknob and swinging it open, she looked at the waist of the man first just to make sure there were no obvious weapons on him. She then stared through his eye sockets and into his soul, making him understand who she was, how aggressively she would fight to keep her life, and how little she cared for his.

She imagined the tussle like it was actually a distinctly plausible turn of events. He would reach into his belt, draw his electrical screwdriver as a weapon of femalular destruction, pistol whip me with it, and then drill holes into my skull. I would have to be quick enough to dodge, dash into the kitchen, grab a knife, and fend him off with it while screaming bloody murder to the rest of the apartment complex. I would then have to barrel my entire body weight into his torso just to knock him back... No, thats out of the question, he would have easy access to my skull in that situation. Hmm. Much to think about.

They discussed the usual details of internet brokerage over a glass of water which he asked for very promptly upon entering. She was being skewered by mental strain each time she had to conversate a phrase or two. It wasn't all that often she would have to deviate this much from her daily routine. She hadn't had to communicate with anyone this early in a long time. Even if she was on campus, she would avoid all social contact. Even if she had friends that would walk by, her gaze would avert and her steps would quicken. If it wasn't directly helping her specifically to succeed, she wouldn't participate in the game.

She watched him glug down the glass, his adam's apple sinking and then popping up like a buoy.

With more deviant forms of expression comes more diversity of thought and imagination.

Just for a moment the movie of them living happily ever after flashed through her mind's eye, the emotions of a future resolved and goals concerted, whole, like the wind on the coast. The scene began with a lusciously flagrant sexual encounter that was sparked from a changing mishap in her bathroom while the man was requesting the location of her router. This awkward but deviously planned housewarming "mistake" would then lead to a satisfaction of the senses and idealizations that popped up in that moment. Obviously this would, probability-wise, be far fetched, but, with her professionally seductive eye contact, she believed that she would get what she want.

Wait, am I actually doing this?