I studied in the shade during recess time and with my forehead against the edge of a table during lunch. Giving in to desperation sometime before the exam, I forced myself to down two sticks of instant espresso (I had saved them in my bag, expecting to consume half of one each time I had a sleepy day). I thought it would help me concentrate. It did not. By the time the test was administered to us, I was so nervous that I was trembling all over and was totally unable to write. I knew all of it, I really did, but as I gazed down at figure 1: posterior view of the human heart, I felt that my own might burst. So I stared blankly at the sheet until the veins and the arteries shifted and tangled with each other to form topological atrocities, and until the ventricles and atriums began to expand and contract so vividly and so violently that I became increasingly perturbed with each passing minute. When it was time to pass the papers forward, I was so numb that the world was almost peaceful.

Afterwards, dazedly, I followed my classmates through corridors, entryways and staircases to the church building for the Friday mass. The sky was rugged and low-hanging, and the air was of a biting cold. I gripped the sides of my arms and pulled myself close, and my hair was blown into tangles. Once at the church’s entrance, we all began to check and adjust each other's collars. Someone combed my hair for me with their fingers, while I stared at my worn leather shoes with embarrassment.

All gathered inside now, we were sat down in the traditional boy-girl-boy-girl pattern and made to listen to the arduously long sermon of the Father, and I think no one was really paying him any mind. Most students were flipping through bibles or hymn-books, or fiddling with their fingernails, or whispering little jokes to their neighbor. More than Father’s voice, the sound of gentle scuffles and whispers filled the air. I may have been the only one who was completely unmoving and silent, then. From my place at the edge of the pew, the side nearest the wall, I let the gentle and colorful light filter through a mosaic window (a dove, opened winged, spectral rays radiating from it) and fall onto my face. I felt very pretty then, and I thought how nice it would be if the light could fall onto my skin like this every day! Oh, how much I abhorred this little life of mine! How bored I was everyday, in school, dragging through seven hours of nonsense, and later on, dragging through my own existence at home. It seemed it would never end; there was nothing to look forward to, besides a continued existence of perpetual desperation to release myself from the clawing consciousness of my own self and its unconquerable and impermanent reality. I would live for beautiful moments like these, and despair when they passed, and at the impossibility of re-experience. The world can be so beguiling at such moments, and then so heartbreaking the next when I lose those moments so suddenly to memory and to time.

The eucharist song began, and I walked up to take the bread.