You wake up in a cold sweat, heart racing from nightmares about being late to class. Groggy, you roll over, grabbing at your phone screen. Its harsh light floods your crusty eyes: 3 minutes before your alarm. Your stomach drops as you lament the receding prospect of simply rolling over and going back to bed. Even though you don’t have any lectures or office hours to drag yourself to, sleeping in is not an option. Welcome to finals week. Goal: find a study room.
Optimistic and naive as you are, you take a leisurely stroll to the school library. It is still before noon: surely nobody else will be studying, right? Surely there will still be spots left? You realize your mistake as you ascend to the second floor. The cubicle rooms are already occupied, whether it be by bodies or by belongings, empty water bottles like cairns on hiking trails. And—is that a pillow? Have people been camping here overnight? Even the classrooms have been thoroughly colonized by scribbled-over papers and laptop cords. A sense of dread washes over your body.
Traversing higher, to the spire where not even snacks are allowed, you see that here, too, has already been conquered by diligent early-bird studiers. Passing by a study table in the corner, a thought crosses your mind: do you risk sitting across a stranger’s belongings? To do such a thing would be to violate the unspoken contract of personal space. The temptation lingers in your mind before you decide to do another lap, just to be sure all the rooms are taken. By the time you return, the seat is already occupied.
Dejected from the library’s boundless cruelty, you leave in search of another frontier. But no matter where you go, something is always wrong. The community centers are too loud, and the team rooms in the dorms are also taken. Even IB is filled with anxious students nursing their third energy drink of the day. Then, an epiphany shudders down your spine, sensation cold and jarring. There is still one building you have dared not enter: AB. A haunted shell of its former self, the fallen angel of student socialization.
You swallow the lump in your throat and walk up its back steps, almost able to feel the ghost of the footsteps of hundreds of students overlapping with your own. The lobby is leaden with the aura of disappointment. Walking towards the aisle of team rooms on the first floor, a graveyard of dark, empty chairs stares back at you. Deeper into the maw of the creature, roaming through hallways as if they were the intestines of a great beast, you finally come across it: a team room barren of the claim of others. You haphazardly toss your bag onto the floor and slump into the chair (which by now might even be a little dusty), prying open your fully-charged laptop. Your reward: 8 consecutive hours of uninterrupted studying. You shall cherish every well-earned moment of the foretold ‘grind,’ and your sleep deprivation shall reach heights never before experienced. You have truly won. But at what cost?
