Same as It Ever Was

I am so small when I stand next to buildings, and so scared of just the silliest things, and Community College is a place full of people who say things like: "Now, at a four-year college they're not going to do this kind of hand-holding", but I have looked around, and fallen on the ground a few times, and I do not think there is anybody here to hold my hand. This is probably a good thing, because as stern professors remind me daily, hand-holding is a terrible, awful, undesirable thing, and I ought to avoid it if I can, and if I can't, I'd better cut that out as soon as possible. It's much better to go it alone, and pretend you know what you're doing, and just be terrified. That's what real people do.

Every day, my mother drops me off at a school where there isn't room for me to sit inside any of the college buildings, so I crouch outside next to a low stone wall, in its pitiful shade, under a two-story steel pergola without vines. It casts enormous, dark shadows on the quad, which is covered with people I do not know, and will never know. They leave me alone, in my smallness; in the bigness. I do not call home, and tell my mother to come pick me up. I do not even, while sitting on that lawn, call a friend to whimper over the phone about sobbing in a bathroom stall, or fainting in class, or just plain sitting all alone for fifteen hours of the goddamn day, most every day. I am tempted. I try to remember that I am propped up by a low stone wall. I am already leaning. Hand-holding would be different.