7 a.m.

Last night, I told myself I would wake up early, but my alarms continued to ring long into the morning. I say last night, but really it was only a few hours ago when I finally returned to my dorm from Boston, weary and delirious, dumping my backpack and jumping under my covers without another thought.

This morning, I sit up, groggy and shadowed. Still reeling from my night in Boston, I get up and start packing to leave for New York. I pick up my backpack, remembering I left my toothpaste in the hotel last night in my rush to check out, catch the train, meet my project partner, lead two club meetings, set up a movie night, and finish my laundry.

9 a.m. 

After a brief goodbye to my roommate, whom I haven’t seen in days, I’m in a forest, holding a C-stand in one hand and a Blackmagic camera in the other. Someone helps an actor shove his feet into clown shoes while the director carries the rest of the equipment down to the lake.

Left to my own devices, I introduce myself to this new group of twelve. I dive into a story about my summer, pausing at the same places to laugh in the same way I did the night before when I introduced myself to a group of fifteen in my intern program. I’ve told it enough times that I’m starting to get bored, and while I’m laughing, my mind wanders to what I have left to pack. Considering I still haven’t unpacked, there isn’t much.

12 p.m. 

In the shower, I think about how I’m always selling my secrets.

1 p.m.

On the train, I think about how, if I’m in a bidding war, I’ve never won.

4 p.m.

I hug my friend at Penn Station. He has a McDonald’s bag in his hands—the order I’ve been getting since junior year, the order I ask for every time I’m in his passenger seat. I tell him about my train ride, which was just a feverish loop of dreaming about people I think I’ve loved, people I am still in love with, people I loved seeing on my phone (it was a new name with every dream), waking up to every conversation and announcement and squeal of the brakes. 

6 p.m. 

The steam from the soup dumplings warms my nose while I talk to my friend. My phone is on the table, which is barely big enough to fit our plates as it is. Every time it lights up with the wrong name, the pit in my stomach grows. My friend can tell that I’m not really here.

7 p.m. 

During my first Broadway show, Michael Maliakel stands towering over me in an umber three-piece and a scowl, playing a beautiful and tortured Nick Carraway as he stands with his arms outstretched. He proclaims, “It eluded us then, but that’s no matter—tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther . . . And then one fine morning—” before he’s drowned out by gold and green dancers, applause roaring through the auditorium. I think about what has been eluding me, about how to run faster, jump higher, reach further, just one more inch, just another hour, just another person, another week, almost there, just a little more—

and then Daisy Buchanan makes eye contact with me, and I realize I should be standing and clapping too.

2 a.m. 

In New York, I drink stolen wine with the McDonald’s friend (the only person on the East Coast who has known me long enough to see me with straight hair), with my new(ish) friend from Brown I have not quite figured out yet, and with a girl I kissed last summer in a different country. Eventually, the wine bottles run out, my two friends leave, and I’m suddenly lying down, looking up at wild curls and sugar-glazed green eyes.

“What’s something you’re afraid to tell other people?” she asks me, legs locked between my knees in her bedroom while sirens and rain harmonize outside.

“Probably… how scared I am to lose them. How far I would go to keep them,” I answer, not exactly making eye contact.

She thinks for a moment, goes silent. She plays with my hair, mumbles something in my ear that I can’t hear, and tells me that she’s making a mental list of what she likes about my face.

She tells me she likes the shape of my upper lip and then kisses me like I’ll disappear if she stops.

3 a.m. 

I text my childhood best friend a poem about her I’d written almost a year ago. It’s mostly to tell her about how “the last time I had you was when I was eight and you / were twelve and we played with dinosaurs and / you still had color in your eyes.”

She tells me she likes it and then adds that she had gotten legally married yesterday. She’s married to someone she met on a Minecraft server almost a decade ago, in between our sleepovers, when we would play the game for sixteen hours straight. 

We would obsess over crafting the perfect world, building a beautiful cave/tree/lake house, curating a zoo of pets, meticulously constructing railways to each other’s houses, hunting monsters on each other’s horses—hers were always faster—while we journeyed endlessly through the world. Sometimes I wonder if we spent so long in our video game world because we knew our lives in the real one would split apart. I can’t build railways to take me from Providence to Denver in fifteen seconds, and she’s too far away now to shoot the monsters behind me while I’m blindly exploring. I settle instead for telling her I’ll fly back for their ceremony, no matter when or where it is.

In my head, I still keep our promise to sip tea on our porch, lifetimes from now, when my hair is white and her back is curved. I still keep our promise to laugh at the kids running down the street, smiling through wrinkles and reminiscing. I make a new promise to remember this one, even if she forgets.

10 a.m.

I say goodbye to the girl from last night, who tells me it’s an anomaly for her to be in her dorm at this time. We live similar lives, dashing from hour to hour like we’re out of time at the ripe age of nineteen. We do it because we want everything—we want to meet everyone, see everything, experience everything, do everything that scares us.

Stop running yourself ragged, she says. At a certain point, the more you try to do, the less you really live.

She makes me promise to watch the sunset. Locks her pinky with mine, kisses her thumb. I think of what really scares me. I wonder if the world will end when I finally make the time to fulfill this promise.

12 p.m.

In a Blank Street Coffee off of 16th, my friend works on a slideshow the same color as my matcha, my third sage-green drink of the day. AJR blasts in my ears, not exactly by choice but strangely fitting: “Can we pause right here, right now / While everyone I love is still in my house?” It’s called “Dog Song,” a nice coincidence because I had spent last night talking to a friend about how she had to act like her dog for an assignment.

She said it was meditative. Time would stretch, for hours and hours and hours, until you forgot what you were thinking of and you forgot what day it was and you forgot why you were even on the ground on all fours in the first place. It was a stark contrast to my summer, where I barely spent a day on the ground before catching the next flight to my next city.

I’m exhausted, I tell her. Tired of the life I’m supposedly obsessed with.

She tells me to try acting like my dog. Apparently it felt religious, and she doesn’t believe in God.

1 p.m. 

She still hasn’t replied, or more specifically, I still haven’t texted her back because I’m waiting for her to come up with something less dry so we can resume our continuous, three-week-long text conversation. I met her three weeks ago, and when we stopped texting, the withdrawal hit hard enough that I learned what a tension headache was for the first time. I told my friend it was the weather because I was too scared to admit how much it hurt that another little magic bubble of Me + Girl had popped. Too annoyed to admit how it hung, overcast, over the entire weekend, even though it was realistically just another person in a long string of people I’ll meet, start craving, and then quit cold-turkey before jumping into something else.

A neon pink sign in a cafe window tells me to stop micro-dosing on love.

4 p.m. 

We’re in a lounge, technically a piano room, but there’s a chart defining Credits and Assets scribbled on the music staff, and profit-maximization formulas instead of key signatures, so I decide to call it a lounge.

I’m silent, because my friend just asked me why I’m sacrificing so much to keep this girl in my life. What’s it worth, he’s asking me. I thought the answer was obvious—it’s always the same story, after all. She’s a good person, we’re friends, we have good conversations, etc. He should know. He’s heard it before.

I know I’m silent for too long, because he looks at me again and tells me that my sanity is worth something too.

11 p.m. 

On the way back to Brown, I’m in another Uber with strangers I turn out to be connected to—we go to a small school. I contemplate texting someone once I make it back to my dorm; I know half my friends are awake, but I'm too exhausted to hunt for yet another warm place that isn't mine to hover in.

Tomorrow, I will crawl out of my bed, take Vitamin D if the sun still isn't out, and start fulfilling the promises I’ve made as if they're fireflies flickering through the rain—small and weak, but a direction to start stumbling towards regardless. 

For now, though, I’ll drift to sleep with nothing but crickets in my ears, blanketed by the heavy acceptance of knowing the next sunrise will come, no matter how far I fall or how fast I run.