Esther Greenwood at KO

I’m not going to class today, I’m too tired to do it. An air of failure seems to cling around me like a brilliant perfume. I sit down on a bench in a park, joints aching. Ahead children play, swinging on monkey bars, rushing down a slide, happy and unthinking, completely oblivious to negativity.  I almost feel like running, or dancing- being free, but its easier just to sit. The wood is damp and coarse, partially dulled by the moisture. Following the grains as they twirl and wrap is like watching a swirling hurricane on a map. People never seem to mind hurricanes, they seem irrelevant masses of hypnotizing clouds: far away, unimportant. Hurricanes are a bit like death if you think about it: they're always far off, but have their own presence, their own unyielding darkness so that imagining them is out of reach. I tried and tried, but simply couldn’t bring myself to mind a storm anymore than the wood’s grain, swirling and twisting, endlessly unchanging in its turbulence. Really, when you think about it, a hurricane isn’t all that different from the school. The schedule changes between weeks, following a pattern, but not quite. No matter how I look at it, although the times are the same, the classes aren’t and their pattern always eludes me: intangible, untouchable, like that swirling storm: far off in the distance. You can’t touch the wind no matter how much you try, which is a shame. I figure I’m more like the wind than anything else, always blowing around, flitting between ideas and possibilities, always moving. That's what makes me feel sick: the linear progression, the order of school, of classes. It's always the same. I’ll just say I was sick, the third time in as many weeks and try again tomorrow. School feels like dying: it hits you in waves, slowly tearing your body apart, aging you patiently. My mother says all this sadness is a result of idle hands, so she's given me a book to read whenever I'm free: "Understanding Development: Theory and Practice in the Third World". She hopes it will make me rethink how much I have. I suppose I'll try it tomorrow.