Numbers

My brain is so full of new information I feel it could burst at any moment and slowly ooze out of my ears. Thicker than water, but thinner than play dough, the pink brain goop leaves a slimy, hot trail, like a slug, down the sides of my neck. My final sensation before taking my last breath is the chill up my spine from the warmth of the goo slithering down the cold skin of my neck.

When I close my eyes I see equations. When I open them, I see scattered papers across the floor. They’re my notes. Axis and vertices, solid and dotted lines… Parentheses and X’s, brackets, dashes, and Y’s. I should write a poem.

My dreams, or should I say nightmares, are of me, searching for numbers. I’m counting the units from zero. I’m reciprocating fractions. I’m solving disjunctions and graphing intersections of linear inequalities. Except in my dreams, my pencil is heavy. Dragging my pencil across the page takes all of the physical energy I have. The paper is huge. Its as big as my bedroom. Then, I realize the pencil is bigger than me too. I appear to have my arms wrapped around a giant, yellow, number two pencil that has the height and girth of an oak tree. Suddenly, I realize the tree-sized pencil is only balancing in my arms, swaying on its over-sized lead point, I feel its weight lean into me. The pencil is falling. I rip my arms away from the tree only in time to try to cover my head when…

I wake up.

I’m having nightmares about school. Numbers, specifically, in case you didn’t notice. I work hard everyday, trying to make sense of these numbers and these equations. I feel like I learn something, and I grasp it, and I know it, only to let it drift into a part of my brain where the memory can’t be accessed. It seems like I forget everything I know within a matter of hours. It’s frustrating. Its disheartening.

I can’t give up. I just have to accept my fate of being glued to my laptop for the next 10 or so weeks. It’s hard to be a busy body in the world of academia. Algebra doesn’t acknowledge your plans or your restlessness. Algebra demands your attention and focus. Algebra doesn’t care if you haven’t seen sunlight today, or any other day, for that matter.

Today, Algebra is a soul-sucking vampire and I am nearly dead.