I thought, I will sit down. I will collect and organize myself, and then I will get one cup of coffee and close my eyes until class starts.

And then I hear,


"Hey. Hey! What's up?"
And I look up and see Jenny Lewis is talking to me. But it's not Jenny Lewis. I have had not that much sleep, and no coffee yet. I have had a morning as the slowest swimmer in Crossfit, and the slowest burpees,  and no sugar yet, and scrambling to finish my cramming for my Comm test and then sentence-tweaking to hand out my story to my workshop, and here I am talking to Jenny Lewis.
Well, her real name is Jenny, and she looks like Jenny Lewis.
Every class period, she gets up halfway through to go to the bathroom, and I think that She Is So Brave to do that. I always envision a life where you can drink as much water as you want and go to the bathroom whenever you please, and it's a far off goal, and the answer is marrying a rich guy and never working again.
But Jenny comes to sit next to me and I admit that I am nervous to hand out my piece. I picture her leaving in the middle of class to go to the bathroom. I see her lazy, lilting walk, like she was maybe once a dancer, and she is used to having the attention, even though her hair is starting to grey in her mid twenties, and she talks like a pot head.

She starts to explain that she is done with her workshop piece too, even though she doesn't have to hand it out for another week.
She wants to tell me the story she wrote.
She gives me uninterrupted eye contact, which is really hard for me to handle. This is because of history of eye-contacters and also that I know now that certain colors burn out when you look at them forever. I look at the color of her while she tells me, giggling, that her story is about two young girls who get caught in a storm, and then a ditch--
"You want to know what happens?" Jenny asks, her head tilted to one side like my Australian shepherd at dinner time.
"Yes," I say, because it is the polite thing, and I know how to make friends in college by now.
"I'm not going to tell you," she says, eating a piece of chocolate, but offering me some.
"Oh it's okay, I have chocolate too, in my lunch bag," I say, blushing, and looking away to give my eyes a break from looking at her eyes.
Can you get high by looking at someone who is probably stoned?
"Well my chocolate is better than yours," she jokes, even though I've had those Love Letter Chocolate Bars before and the love letters they come with are less than inspiring.
I smile again and look back at her.
"I'll tell you how it ends, because I know it's killing you," she says.
I nod, trying to figure out where she comes from. How do people end up the way they are? What did their parents do to them? What did their lovers do to them?
"Well, the girls gets stuck, but then her brother grabs her hand," she said.
I looked at her.

I looked at her for another second, and then I realized that she meant that that was the end, and I tried to all of the sudden feign surprise.
"Oh he saves her?" I acted very happy to know the end.
"Yeah, well you don't know for sure. It ends with him holding her hand."
"Wow. I'm so glad," I said, in what I believe was a convincing version of me. But then in that split instant I wondered, do people think I am convincing or do they know that I'm just a phony? They can probably tell by my clothes, even though I am the only girl in class with plucked eyebrows and mascara on.
"Yeah," she says, so sure of herself, that I suddenly feel sure of myself. I feel sure of the chocolate brand that I have in my lunch pail. I feel sure of my burpees and sure that I breathe the same air in my lungs that everyone else breathes... but that it feels richer to me in some moments, and when I am sad, it may feel richer to them in their moments.

And the rich, fresh piney air that I thought was just something I smelled during Green Air Days in Utah, was actually fresh mulch that they surrounded the trees in the courtyard that I walk through every afternoon.

But I don't give up.

When people say that thing of how their marriage grows better everyday, well...

That is how I feel about college, which is a really unfortunate thing. I'm enjoying the last of the days.
When I sleep at night, I try to think how I can turn them into more days.