I’ve come to a state where my hands are in an on-and-off relationship between tearing apart and being too slippery for me to manage to hold a cup of water. My skin is peeling itself off daily to the point that half of my left hand doesn’t have the outer layer of skin, and I’ve lost the ability to use my phone’s “digital scan.” To combat this, I’m using creams and ointments. That’s actually quite funny, just not for the part where touching most things is a tad bit more annoying due to the fact that every surface is either too pointy or too rough. But it hasn’t stopped me from doing any basic tasks, more of an annoyance really.

All that to say that I’m not in my best moment. I don’t know if I want to pinpoint any culprit of this crime other than the usual suspect, which is me. Of course. But in doing that, I don’t really have any satisfaction since blaming myself is easy, and this diagnosis isn’t helpful if I can’t address the symptoms yet, or even understand them to be honest. Sleeping, for example, has been an arduous task; the ways in and out of the dream realm seem like a quick jog to Mordor. I’ve been waking up feeling either too cold or drenched in sweat. Usually, I’m pretty confident with my nightmare management skills, but in the past few days, they haven’t followed the usual script of me dying in horrid ways but felt more like an anxiety rush for getting things done that wakes me up with the inescapable feeling that I can’t really run away from my menial life.

College is coming to an end, and not through any help from me. I’ve been postponing and procrastinating like the professional I am. But even so, it seems that it is in everyone’s interest that I get done with it already. I guess I won’t get discovered as the fraud I am, but let’s not abandon our hopes, for I’m still not out of the fray yet! All jokes aside, I do feel like it would feel better to treat my last moments in college with more respect for what it meant for me. Running around paperwork issues and one or two situations where I’ll have to juggle one or two bad grades I had during my time in Italy shouldn’t mean complete disregard for the fact that in the past four and a half years, I’ve grown quite far from the teenager I was when I first got in, even if there’s a lot of him hanging around the bedrooms I now inhabit.

As you can see, I’m not in such a bad mood. I like to draw analogies when I can, and for me, it is somewhat clear that in the same way my slippery but bruised – didn’t mention before, but I’ve got two huge (and this time I promise I’m not exaggerating too much) yellow bruises on each wrist that I got from an actually successful attempt at climbing – hands can’t seem to be good for holding anything while they’re in the cycle of both healing and destroying themselves, I, as of my heart, can’t seem to get too far from my anxiety chains. Something like a metaphorical cardiac arrest.

And I’m trying my best to keep on keeping on with my life after the most excruciating emotional experience I’ve had in my adult life. I feel like after all the pain shook my hand and said farewell, everything seems a little bit out of reach. Quite telling that my hands are falling apart; everything I let go of leaves claw marks on me. Can’t say that I’m not hopeful for my future, I am. It’s just because I’m in the middle of a road and no one’s here to hurt me.

All in favor of fresh starts say: chama. haha.