the uwc experience
A six foot box. That is what I am. Ever since I was a child with an email address, I wanted to develop a habit of checking emails everyday. Because that is how responsible working adults act, and I loved trying to be all grown up. For almost most of that childhood, I never had any emails that I would want to read except the ones I signed up for when I didn’t know spam was a thing. But for some four months, I used to check my emails everyday. Some days four or five times. but slowly it faded into twice a week, not because I was any less excited or any less hopeful, I just told myself good things take time. I was in this habit for a month. Sometime after that a part of me had understood it was never gonna come. The two times was just for the parts of me that still believed in me. The parts that let me be so confident for something. And I still kept telling myself to be patient. Now, it wasn't in anticipation of an email, but to control the angst that had been starting to grow since the past month.
It had been two months now, not two months from the interview, two months from the day everybody started getting their emails. I almost convinced myself of something. Somewhere in the process they deleted the box with my name on it. It was possibly grey. It was me, a six-foot box with a name colored, or de-saturated grey waiting to be deleted. Not because it didn't want to exist, just not like this. Not in this limbo, where I write an email and send it to myself everyday to try to keep hold of the little hope I had left in myself, or sometimes, to get rid of it because that little email had consumed all of the space I had in my life, and gave it a bleak purpose to let that void stay inside of me.
It finally happened. I got the email. I didn't read it. I couldn't get myself to read it. I just knew this is not the email that I was waiting for. So I closed my laptop and got up from my chair. I wanted to cry. Still, I couldn't get a tear to form. I was just a mess. I didn't want to tell anyone about it, but nobody really needed telling. Everybody saw that I had moved on with it. Everybody, but that little part in me. And you know what they say, "You just can't beat the person who never gives up." And you can't beat me, you can make me cry, make me hate myself, but none of that is gonna do anything to me. And surprisingly, six foot boxes can be pretty versatile. So fuck you with your fancy UWC degree Aleen.
(the last part was totally unnecessary, but I just wanted to say the last sentence, and who is a man who tells himself what he can't do, even if it will piss off his girlfriend)