Fucking cold day - clutching the rough sling of my bag tightly to my shoulder, bunching into myself, feeling the veins deep inside me strain to pump superannuated blood back from the freezing extremities to an equally labourious heart. Traipsing the corridors of stale puddles and grimy tiles to and fro classrooms in which theories are taken out of freshly-unwrapped boxes, soaked in the brine jars of adolescent scholarship and unceremoniously hung out to dry. Trying my outmost to fight the awesome effects of a chronic self-imposed sleep disorder. A cold draught sweeps through the corridors and I chide myself for my poor choice of dress today. One layer of garment is never enough on days when the frailty of your heart is tested, again and again. The cold gets everywhere - it ruptures the invisible dams that hold back the flow of mucus, it makes the cheap paper your notes are printed on curl at the corners and soften into cheaper pulp, it makes me want to take the short bus ride back to my room and curl in bed under heaps of blankets. I clutch at anything like a prize, anything of value is eagerly grabbed upon with eager fingers. Life can be lived only forwards but analyzed only backwards. I walk ahead, proudly, each time, I try my best to uphold that self-image of a fearless, peerless individual who has nothing to lose and everything to gain - I do not look back. I only take a tiny peek, a inch of a nook of a cranny of a peek back over my shoulder, when I am alone in my room in the deepest of night, when I am alone, when I am alone. Reading Kierkegaard today I am not sure if I can reconcile to myself his assertion that to believe or have faith that God exists, without ever having doubted God's existence or goodness, would not be a faith worth having. Existentialism, yes, but Christian existentialism? No pun intended, but God! It's funny. I question God to no end but I never question Love. It's a fucking cold day. My sneakers squeak in protest as I round corners with a sense of urgency. Things have to be done, meanings thrashed out, meetings done and concluded, words to be spoken and uttered and forgotten the very next second. Life buzzes. It gives off a white noise. When you turn up the volume dial you hear the noise buzz, on and on and on, a monotonous aural claptrap that you can't censor or ignore but are forced to put on your very self, like a shroud. Like a yoke - oh please Eisen don't fucking go biblical again. Like a wet towel you apply to your face. I talk to myself as I walk, oblivious to the people around me. My eyes are quick to dart around, to make out the dashes of bright colour amongst the drab dingy environment, the drab dingy skies hanging low overhead, the rigor mortis of day slowing creeping and hardening into the solid petrified corpse of night. The City is Unreal, so is my school, I declare! God bless my literature prof today. He teased out the closet nihilist in me. He brought me to the edge of the abyss and told me to look over the edge and then slapped me back into existence. And did I mention that it's a fucking cold day today? My hands feel icy to me. I need to deconstruct my life, like, seriously, now. I have essays to complete, I have group projects to hammer out, I have piles of notes to pore through. I shall run the wheel dutifully for another month. I shall postpone the elegiac, funereal strains of my inner death for another month.

And then I thought of you.