Decay and the Bitterness That Follows It

1

“Fcuk my life.”

It was written in clumsy script on the door of the bathroom stall she was in, and however angst-ridden the vandalism was she could not help laughing at it. The perpetuator could have spared her audience the effort to take out a Sharpie and correct it, which Helena did, all the while awkwardly in her current position.

She was not sure about what she was doing inside the stall. She was not taking a piss or emptying herself of the horrible potato salad served for lunch in the cafeteria an hour ago; she was neither bulimic nor trying to be. But she was there, inside the stall, sitting on the toilet seat with her pants on. She was feeling neurotic again today, and the thought that countless other (possibly neurotic) girls might have sat on that seat made her feel nauseous. She kept sitting anyway. It was safer there.

She waited for the school bell to ring. It did, a few minutes after she went into the stall, and it screamed awfully like the swine being slaughtered in her grandmother’s farmhouse. Idly, she got up, took her bag, and pushed the door open, walking towards mirrors blotched with age. She stared but it took her a while to notice herself; she thought she might have been asleep, and in her slumber forgot that she should wake up.

She noticed the asymmetry of her face. It had been a while since she last looked at herself in a mirror and saw something, and it was odd that this had to happen in a school toilet. The least bit classy, if you’d ask her. If she wanted to experience a rescue from identity crisis, she wished it were in a celebrated place. Like Madison Square Garden or at least inside her own bedroom.

A girl in her organic chemistry class was beside her, fixing her hair into a ponytail. “The professor said he will be returning our exams today,” she said, and hurried out.

Helena sighed. She did not understand why people had to be in such a hurry all the time, even if they knew the earth would not stop rotating should they be late for class, or why they enjoyed that class in the first place. But she enjoyed Ayn Rand, and people did not understand why either.

2

The professor was a nondescript man who wore his blue shirts with baggy khaki pants. He was of average height and had a face that probably looked like that of other organic chemistry professors – squint-eyed from reading too many dissertations and tight-lipped from being mentally condescending. From where he was standing, he appeared so learned, but looking more closely as Helena received her exam paper, she found he was just another person who went to college and pulled countless all-nighters for that degree. She felt disappointed.

3

In one of the bars near the university, an organization was having its year-end party. It was a quarter to ten when Helena decided to go; hours before that she was finishing up three laboratory reports that were due the past week, and she had been drowning herself in Red Bull because her roommates had already left. They had pleaded her to come because they thought she looked horrible and needed the time to “relax,” and for the first time she agreed with someone else’s perception of her. School was taking its toll on her. Everything was taking its toll on her. She was tired, even though she knew she had not worked hard enough for any of her classes; but then, she told herself again and again that they were not worth the effort. She was a passionate girl and interest fuels her. This was not interesting. Nothing she ever did seemed interesting.

Was this all education promised for her, and perhaps for every other student - a couple of notes on Markovnikov’s rule to help her predict the outcome of some addition reactions, or maybe a stack of handouts about stereoisomerism?  She would have to put up with spending the rest of her stay in college being force-fed information she did not want to digest.

She might as well be academically-bulimic.

She was young and selfish. She knew so much and so little at the same time. And all of this thinking piled up on her everyday, until today, this breaking-point in her threshold of pain. She wanted to regurgitate everything in her head until all that was left was her half-baked analysis of Huxley’s Brave New World. She knew what she wanted out of life but had no idea how to obtain it. That saddened her the most.

4

Outside the bar, three kids were smoking. One of them, Chuck, was an English major and took gender studies with her last semester. He was rather taciturn, only talking whenever the teacher called on him. Upon recognizing Helena, he walked towards her and said, “Your roommate asked me to keep an eye out for you. She’s inside.”

He tapped the stick so that ash would fall down, and he was jumpy with his free hand in the pocket of his jeans. He turned his head slightly to the left to blow the smoke away, but kept his eyes on her, as if waiting for her response.

“Okay,” was all she said. She proceeded to the door, which was barred by bodies of men and women grinding against each other (although it was still quite early), and she had to push hard to get in. They gave her puzzled looks but returned to devouring each other anyway. She stood on her toes to get a better view of the crowd, which was bathed in neon lights, and within an excruciating minute, she found two of her roommates by the drinks. Luckily, they were not so far away.

“Where’s Leslie?”

They pointed to a figure dancing calmly amidst the heated confusion. Leslie was a tactless person and, as a Psychology major, sometimes talked about inconsistencies in her roommates’ behaviors rudely, but she always had control over herself. In that second, however, she stopped dancing and glared at something they could not discern, and ran off like a lost child.

5

“What the hell happened?” Helena felt jittery all of a sudden, mostly due to Leslie’s little “fit” and partly to her increasing thirst. She grabbed an empty cup from the unused stack and filled it with—she was not sure what exactly, all she wanted was to drink something. She kept asking the same question, still eyeing the spot Leslie left open, subconsciously expecting her to come back.

“Must be her ex,” one said.

“Or that pasta she had for dinner,” the other chimed in, and they laughed.

6

Annoyed, Helena left the table in search of Leslie. It was a harrowing pilgrimage, Leslie being the sought-out Mecca, and Helena the impious Muslim who quit after encountering several wrong turns. The crowd had grown since she arrived. She felt like her lungs could burst from the pressure of being with so many people.

She returned to the table defeated. Her two roommates were still poised over shots of tequila, chatting endlessly about North Korea (they were History majors) and doubling up like madmen.

“Any time now Kim Jong-un could explode and send out bio-agents,” they said, and shoved a glass into Helena’s hands. “And then Helena’d show up with the counter-measure. That would be historical!”

“She deserves a drink for that!”

They clapped and laughed and raised their own glasses to her, and for a while Helena thought she might be the only sane person in the world. But this world, Rome, is too suffocating, and if she did not follow these Romans, she would fall into the deepest isolation.

She drank until the bass was enveloping her brain like an anxious mother. Inside, she felt 

like a multitude of drummers were lulling her to sleep with their rhythm, which, although sloppy and distorted, worked for her senses. When she opened her eyes she would see the crowd slowly melting into a single organism, riding wave by wave the passage of time, asking her to join them.

She did.

Heavily she flailed her arms around. It was liberating. Then and there, she did not have to think about her discontentment with life, or about her academic standing, or about her inability to change things. Being human guaranteed living with limits, and although life itself was already something to be grateful for, being human also warranted Helena’s incessant want to be limitless.

“Hey.”

Chuck was in front of her now, smiling, but it was a smile of many layers; she could not read him. She embraced him anyway, riding with him on those waves, letting his breath catch in her ear like wind in the summer. Somehow, in the flurry of events, she ended up in a bathroom stall again—this time with a dutiful English major who had his tongue down her throat. Very classy.

She felt her blouse loosening up, buttons escaping their watchful holes, when she found a familiar phrase in clumsy script on the door. The first word was spelled correctly that time.

In her panic, she pushed Chuck away, making sense of what was around her: four walls, a toilet, a boy, and three words that explained how her life would have been had she not seen them earlier. With all the consciousness she still had, she re-buttoned her blouse and ran outside. She found Leslie by the stairs, crying. Helena did not ask why; she thought she understood, so with much desolation she helped Leslie walk back to their dormitory room, where one last laboratory report was waiting to be written.