A Dose of 3:37 Hopelessness

The room aches with silence, and I feel dead—dead to my heart. Locked away in the stuffy dorm room, as the window proves to be my only outlet to an outside world that I fear at the moment I am not strong enough to face.
Looking up and down the poorly lit dorm halls I can smell the scent that only this dorm harbors, a smell like no other. It is a pungent, wretched of a smell, the scent best being described as one that has been created, and with everything in this hall it has at one point reeked highly of this smell, but then had been sprayed with cheap cleaner in order to deafened a scent that cannot truly die.
As I walk down the hall, the walls are almost hugging my hips, as they secure their way to my place of residence. Directly outside my dorm room, there is a flashy lime-green exit sign, and the neon lime dances on and off, as it flickers its last breaths of energy, creating a picture that could easily be compared to a “no vacancy” sign one finds at a low budget motel. There are faces as I walk to my room, faces that I see almost as much as I see my own, but faces that don’t mean much more then the obviously hello’s that we exchange up to five times a day.
I walk into my room and it’s mellow. The kind of mellow I used to hate as kid. The kind where mom wants to take a nap on a Sunday afternoon, and dad has the meaningless tones of the jubilant football announcers echoing through our home. It is a melancholy mellow, evoking neither happiness nor depression, it just is, in all its reality, a reminder that tomorrow the week begins again, and until this happens room 145 will rest upon this.
I can hear the chattering of nature, as birds converse back and forth in what sounds like a broken melody, and then the powerful wind whispers its lullaby, cutting out the barking of the frantic dog in the near distance.
My eyelids feel heavy, as though a thousand bricks fall at my very blink, and my heart is swollen with anxiety and sorrow, as I pine the many troubles that induce me with an illness I am afraid I cannot immediately cure. I look around at myself, as I sit here unnoticed. I cannot help but dream of being somewhere else.
Maybe somewhere big like London or New York; I could stand stylishly on the sides of the cement sidewalk and pretend I know who I am, pretend I know where I am going. Or perhaps I could be somewhere more picturesque. I can see it now, rolling, lush hills of green, lakes of icy water, and rock formations that could take even the strongest mans breath away. Though both these ideas are nice, maybe I want to be somewhere warmer, possibly a beach, I could sit on the densely heated sand in a two piece bathing suit and trendy sunglasses, as I sipped on a fancy lemonade, and drifted in a thoughtless sleep as the calming waves kissed the sandy shore. I could out do this idea entirely, and go somewhere where I could make a difference. I could be a missionary in the thick jungles of Africa, I could walk into a village with my sun heated face and my heart would swell with joy at the smiles of the children, the love in the people’s eyes. No longer would I be consumed with small things, but maybe then, if only for that moment, I would forget about me, long enough to really give my love to someone else, a kind of love, Christ himself wants us to attain.
An exotic vacation would be grand, making a difference would be even grander, but as I sit here freezing on quite possibly the most painful chair, it is becoming more and more evident this is where I am. I suppose I could take off my dirt covered sneakers, the clunky earrings in my ears, and pull out my hair ribbon and slip quietly between the folds of my sheets. I could wrap the soft plaid comforter around me, and pull every blanket on my bed, up past my lips, beyond my eyes, and soon I would be covered, consumed, hidden, and forgotten. I could shut my tired eyes and dream of magical places where school wouldn’t exist and where my problems would no longer be quite as visible.
Ahh, but I cannot do that. There is a world to face, and there are things to be done, and nothing fruitful will be accomplished hidden away. So I must breath in, then breath out, do the things that are imperative that I get done, and pretty soon things will look better.