On the Verge of Graduation

ALISSA MARTINEZ

I’m worried I broke my brain for nothing— that the hollow space will never be filled, nothing to reap in this soil I’ve long tilled. And I’ll tell myself learning for learning’s sake is reward enough; I’ll swallow that sweet lie, wash it down with a bottle of dark rye. I’ve never liked whiskey all that much, but there are so many things I swore off, like the smoke in my lungs, that old cough that keeps coming back up and up and up. My better hopes and dreams haunting me every time I turn toward a mirror and see those godforsaken bags, deep and dark— reminders of every hour I didn’t sleep because I had too many deadlines to keep. And my momma tells me it’ll be over soon, but it all being over scares me even more because I can’t remember who I was before walking through those doors, blinded and blindsided by all I couldn’t hope to know, just desperate for somewhere to go that wasn’t home but now I’m home again. It feels like I’m sinking in the sand, losing all my time, forgetting the rhyme—

schemes for better days going to the wayside, upside down, back and forth, tossed and turned every miserable night I knew I’d wake to the same tomorrow. And tomorrow will I really be ready to face the facts of my own fiction— to accept I’m not as okay as I pretend to be? As I need to be to walk away from it all? Understand that I won’t be there next fall, that I occupied a borrowed space. And I want to say it was all worth it. I want to believe every bit of shit I put up with—every time I broke down in a bathroom stall between classes, drank to cope and lost my glasses— every step deeper into the pit of myself that left me hearing voices so close to mine whispering what I always knew— I want to believe it was all worth it. But the more I say it, the more I doubt— so much of me just wants to be out. At the end of the line I just have to cross. Yet as much as I want this ending, and know there’s so little worth defending, I know I’m going to miss this, this, this shaky, shifting, shitty time running over with kind friends and stunning sunsets that made me feel infinite. And at the end of my rope I can only find borrowed words another sob story signed: My best friends and enemies, I don’t want to leave you.