Awaiting Greater Storms

I hold the piece of paper with both hands. My heart hammers loudly inside my chest, drowning out the noise of the other kids around me. My face flushes red and my hands are slick with sweat. It is all right, I tell myself. Just one out of four. Only 25%. It will neither make me nor break me and there will be other chances, in the future, perhaps.

But my reasoning fails to convince me, as it always has. I vacillate between opening it now or saving it for home, where its trauma might be mitigated in solitude. If I open it at home, nothing will change save that my possible disappointment will be known only to me. But Courage seizes me at last. In a single foolhardy instant, the barriers come crashing down and the meticulous reasoning of hours vanish like smoke. I flip open the folded paper.

A row of A's march down the page. So there had been nothing to worry about, after all. A grin spreads across my face. It takes me a millisecond to absorb the information and half a second more for my breathing and pulse to return to normal. The storm as passed. The sky is bright and as blue as the sea. Giddy, I stuff the piece of paper into the bottom of my book bag and set my sights for home.

A Pool Reflecting a Starless Night Sky

She is in a pool, submerged from head to toe. The water is cold and murky and tastes of salt. At this depth no light can penetrate the water. All she sees is inky blackness spreading fifty miles in every dimension. She does not know why her husband left her. It is probably her fault. It always is. She had yelled at him too much for his affair, blamed him too vehemently for their crumbling marriage, refused too stubbornly to compromise. Every single mistake in her life had always been her fault, for as long as she could remember. She should have pleaded for him to stay. She should have tried to maintain their relationship. She should have worked overtime that day and not gone home to find them together on the bed.

Opening her eyes is no different from closing them, here, so deep in the pool. She would go see her psychiatrist, she tells herself. She would get up from the couch and walk over to her car and drive to her psychiatrist. She would go see her psychiatrist and ask him why nobody else makes mistakes.

The pool is calm. Like a mirror, it reflects the starless night sky without a single ripple to disturb its surface. She is still underneath the waves, holding her breath, unsure of how long she can hold it before going up for air. She does not want to rise. The night is cold and the water is warm. The buzz of the television rings in her ears. A tree branch scratches at her window. The room is fetid with four days worth of trash. The water envelopes her like a cocoon. She must swim deeper. A stroke of her arm, a kick of her legs - the water meets her like a lover. The pool is warm, the night is cold, and she does not want to rise.

[Headline: Depression Defies the Rush To Find an Evolutionary Upside]

Formal Wear

There are very few occasions that require me to dress up, but when I do it is invariably for the same occasion with invariably the same clothes. A white collared shirt and black pants make up the entirety of my formal wear, and the only occasions where I am forced to wear them is for my concerts. I've played violin for seven, eight, hinging on nine years now. For every single one of those years I remember fumbling with the top button of my white shirt or struggling to cinch the belt to my waist. Was my tie crooked? Was there bow rosin on my clothes? Did my pants get muddy on the walk to the driveway? That white shirt and black pants accompanied me on some of the most anxious nights of my life, were my sole companions in those long, solo recitals before scores of people, gave me courage during auditions where a single slip-up meant months of work down the drain. They are as much a part of my violin as my bow.

It is unfair of me to speak like I've owned the same pair of dress clothes for all nineteen years of my life. I eat, I sleep, I grow. What fit me in elementary school will not fit me in middle school, and what fit me in middle school will not fit me in high school. But the white dress shirt and black pants are so uniform, so constant, that I feel like they have been growing along with me, matching my every new inch with their own. Each white shirt I've owned always had eight buttons. Each pair of black pants I've owned always had a small golden clip hanging off a belt loop. I do not remember ever shopping for new dress clothes; they have always been sitting in my closet, pristine, waiting. It is only when, on my occasional sifts through the old clothes box in the basement, I happen upon an older set of dress clothes, slightly smaller but almost identical to my current set, that I realize how far I've come from the nine-year old who first laid his chin upon a violin and slashed the first notes to "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star."