30.2

November 14, 2021

Everystudent School Assignment Part 2

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What Everyone Wants of Everystudent

Life is unfair. 

EveryTeacher commands specific assignments to be done,

EveryStudent just wishes to write what she’d like,

And Grades will be useless come graduation. 

GPA tags along as a wonderful curtain,

A way of leading everyone to believe that she is a perfect student, 

But behind that curtain there is much struggle... 

From School; 

From Work; 

From Everything. 

Nothing is easy. 

Life has increasingly become the hardest obstacle, 

And Work is easily the worst to face,

Not so much the job itself,

But the Manager who has a clear disregard for Every Student's...

Everything.

Her schoolwork. 

Her personal life. 

Her mental health.

Manager cares little for anything except her Christmas bonus. 

She leaves her workers tired and aching, 

Controlling the thread of their times.

For everystudent, that threads become the difference between sane and insane;

Between happy and depressed;

Between life and death.

Everystudent is one more bad day of work, 

From never making it to tomorrow.

Let alone graduation.

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I can’t make the story you want. 

I can’t write a nice little allegory about getting over hard assignment, 

Or dealing with incompetent project members. 

Making it to my twenty-third birthday was hard enough,

And making it to graduation will mean nothing. 

It’s just another couple thousand dollars of debt I’m going to be in, 

That’s all I will think of at graduation. 

Not the “cap and gown”, 

Or the “dean’s list student” paper I received in the mail last week,

Because my life has been nothing but darkness since my sophomore year of high school, 

And what I gave you last week was the best I could do for this. 

I could give you the dark, 

And I could give you the light. 

The dark is my obstacle. 

It has been since 2014 from the first day my mother went into a medically induced coma, 

And it has been that way everyday until she died in 2018, 

And beyond.

Those four years were very dark, 

But unfortunately it’s only got darker.

The light may not be a virtue, 

But it is my savior; 

My saving grace from the dark that pushed it back for some time, 

But dark and light constantly fight, 

And let me tell you that dark wins a lot. 

Depression wins a lot. 

I wish,

OH GOD DO I WISH,

I could tell you that “I have the help I need”;

But I don’t. 

The only help I have is music because it is the only thing that drowns out everything that is wrong with my life.

My friends come and go, disappearing in and out like a shoty camera focus,

My family doesn’t understand anything, 

My coworkers know nothing. 

No one knows what really goes on in my head. 

When everything boils over in my brain. 

And I normally start uncontrollably crying and shaking, 

I write. 

I write everything out through the tears. 

All the feelings, 

And hatred I feel towards any and everything. 

I. Just. Write. 

It’s what I did last Monday when I submitted the first allegory, 

And it’s what I do right now at 10:30 at night. 

I can’t give you a character, 

An “everystudent”,

Going through the ups and downs of life to get to graduation.

I can’t give you someone who doesn’t represent at least some part of who I am.

In every story I write, the main character is always someone outside the boundaries of reality, 

Someone flawed, hurt, left behind, abused, depressed, or downright trapped in a way they can’t control. 

Writing a character involves putting parts of yourself into them to bring the story to life, 

And I’m sorry that my everystudent is not someone like what you wanted;

Someone who tries to step over a crack, 

When in reality there is a canyon in front of them, 

And no way across without pain.

I can’t give you what you want. 

I can’t give you two obstacles and two virtues.

I can’t give you an everystudent who gets over the problems with no effort. 

I can’t write a simple battle of good and evil for an allegory. 

All I can write is this.

I can write how I feel like I don’t want to make it to tomorrow. 

I can write all the things that flow through my brain on a daily basis. 

I can show you that getting to graduation is not the struggle for me, 

Getting through life is the struggle. 

Getting up tomorrow for work and having to deal with the Manager, 

And the ever increasing annoyance she brings me. 

Worrying about the two assignments, discussions, and quizzes I have due Wednesday, 

But having no time to do them brings me only stress.  

And then the essay I have for a literature class on Thursday,

That I absolutely disdain having to write.

If you want obstacles, 

I can give you this list. 

But I can’t give you virtues.  

I can not give you high morals and and strong standards, 

When I barely have enough strength to get through a day without crying, 

And screaming, 

And wanting to leave the world with not even a second thought.