4. - Orientation (Age 18) *1988*
1022 Words
College began without ceremony.
There was no clear dividing line between who I had been and who I was supposed to become—just a long drive, a few boxes, and my mother standing too close while pretending she wasn’t afraid. Jennifer cried in a controlled way, the kind that made me feel like I was already failing some invisible test. My father shook my hand as if I were leaving for work instead of leaving home.
I told myself this was the beginning. I didn’t realize yet that beginnings can feel exactly like endings if you don’t know what you’re losing.
My dorm room smelled like industrial cleaner and other people’s nervousness. The walls were bare, the bed too narrow, the desk scarred with initials carved by hands I would never meet. I traced one of the carvings with my finger—J.T. + R.—and wondered if they remembered being here, or if this place had erased them as efficiently as it would erase me.
I unpacked slowly. Ritual mattered. Shirts folded. Books aligned. Cigarettes hidden in the bottom drawer beneath socks, as if shame could be neatly compartmentalized. I told myself I would quit now that I was here. New place. New rules. New version of myself.
That lie lasted less than an hour.
Orientation week was noise masquerading as structure. Too many names, too many smiles, too many forced conversations that evaporated the moment they ended. People spoke loudly about their majors, their plans, their confidence. I nodded and mirrored when necessary, careful not to say too much. I had learned by then that the more you revealed, the more you lost control over how it would be remembered.
I smoked behind the dorms that first night.
The spot wasn’t hidden, just ignored. A patch of concrete near the dumpsters where people pretended not to see each other. The cigarette felt different there—less rebellious, more medicinal. My lungs burned the same way, but the context had shifted. This wasn’t defiance anymore. It was maintenance.
I watched the smoke rise and wondered how many versions of myself were dissolving with it.
Classes started. Lectures blurred together. I sat in the back rows and took notes I never reread. My handwriting got worse. My attention fractured. I would listen for a few minutes, then drift—into memory, into sensation, into the quiet calculation of how long until I could step outside and smoke again.
I started to notice gaps.
Not dramatic ones. Small ones. A conversation I couldn’t fully reconstruct. A walk across campus that felt shorter than it should have been. A lecture I knew I’d attended but couldn’t recall leaving. At first I blamed exhaustion. Then stress. Then nothing at all.
Smoking helped. Or at least it convinced me it did.
Each cigarette drew a line around the present moment. Inhale—now. Exhale—now. The world simplified itself into manageable pieces: flame, breath, ash. I didn’t have to remember anything beyond that. I didn’t have to plan. I just had to repeat.
Anna wrote once.
A letter. Actual paper. Her handwriting was careful, familiar. She asked how I was adjusting. She mentioned prom, almost casually, as if it were a shared landmark instead of a fault line. I read the letter twice, then folded it and put it in a drawer.
I didn’t write back.
It wasn’t cruelty. It was paralysis. I didn’t trust my memory enough to narrate myself honestly, and I didn’t trust myself enough to lie convincingly. So I did nothing. Doing nothing had become a skill.
Weeks passed. Or maybe days stretched. Time behaved differently here. Without my parents’ routines anchoring it, everything felt loose, negotiable. Nights bled into mornings. I slept irregularly. I smoked constantly.
I began to associate certain places with forgetting.
The library stairwell. The far side of campus near the old science building. A bench by the river where the water moved too fast to follow. I would sit there and smoke and feel something in me soften, dissolve, retreat. I told myself it was calm. I didn’t want to call it disappearance.
Sometimes I caught my reflection in windows and didn’t like how long it took to recognize myself. My eyes looked dulled, as if someone had turned the contrast down. I pressed my fingers against the glass once, just to confirm I was still solid.
I burned myself more often.
Careless burns. The kind that happen when your mind leaves before your body does. I watched the blisters form with detached curiosity, cataloging them like data points. Evidence of presence. Evidence of damage.
One night, lying in my dorm bed, I tried to remember my fifteenth birthday.
I couldn’t.
I could remember the cigarette behind the gym. The rain. The taste of rust in the air. But the birthday itself—the cake, the faces, the sequence of events—was gone. Not blurred. Gone.
That scared me.
I sat up and lit a cigarette out the window, ignoring the rule posted on the wall. Smoke drifted back into the room, curling around the ceiling like a thought that refused to settle. I inhaled deeply, too deeply, and coughed until my eyes watered.
For a moment, fear sharpened everything.
Then it passed.
That was when I understood something fundamental and unforgivable: fear, too, was temporary. And habits were patient.
College was supposed to make me someone else. Instead, it stripped away the scaffolding that had been holding me together. Without supervision, without consequence, I didn’t rise to the occasion—I dissolved into repetition.
Cigarette.Class.Silence.Cigarette.
I stopped thinking about the future entirely. It felt like an unreliable narrator. I lived in increments now. Five minutes. One cigarette. One walk across campus. One night survived.
Somewhere deep inside me, something was keeping score. I could feel it tallying losses, marking omissions, noting how often I chose forgetting over endurance. I didn’t know yet what would happen when the ledger filled.
I only knew that every morning, before thought fully returned, my hand reached instinctively for the pack.
And every morning, I let it.
- Writer
