Again another morning. Woken up by my alarm that always seemed to incite panic, I sat in my unmade, disorderly bed for a few minutes. Procrastination seems to take hold with unseen hands for around fifteen minutes until a ghostly push of motivation lifts me to my feet to get my school work and computers ready for the morning. 

I know I will make it through the day again. I just don’t know if I will be out in one piece. Storm winds seem to wrap around my mind, drawing up mixed and indescribable feelings. Before the day even begins. 

The air drawn in feels stale. Even with the sun-bright computer screen, the room is as dark as my head is. Class is typical and uneventful. There is no spice, no change, no excitement. It only takes a few quiet clicks to power on my Chromebook for my first meeting loading in for the day, but an uncomfortable silence looms over the class. One static-buggy voice speaks, and the day repeats itself again.

Storm winds brewing inside pick up the pace. Today is not a normal breeze, not light rainfall. It’s a storm. 

Two open computers, color-coded cheap notebooks, bulky textbooks, and workbooks. They are carelessly scattered and set aside to forget about after their usage. As I frantically write notes as teachers lecture, my hands cramp up from overdoing it. An angry blister resides on my right hand where my pencil would have been, a permanent friend of mine that is a constant reminder of due work. Handwritten answers in workbooks vary in their legibility due to this. 

It's a thundercloud of emotions. Violent and crashing of freezing, blue rain against windows in the middle of the night is common. Thunder and lightning were thought to be a good thing- a flash of light, of clear-thinking, but yet is gone in a tenth of a second and catches thought-processes on fire. Flash-flood warnings all around and the destruction of the chaos overruns coping mechanisms drilled into memory. 

There are some assignments easier than others. There are some assignments harder than others. There are those which only take ten minutes and are accompanied by three multiple-choice questions that are a breeze.  Then there are ones that take an eternity to complete or are a never-ending cycle.  Dozens of pages of a textbook to read, up to five tests to complete and study a week, around a dozen workbook pages due. The click after click can only do so much in a day, especially after some class time that teachers choose to waste. The not-so-well written, blended-together words dotted down during class eventually comes to a stop, and other assignments kick-started until the end.

I’m the storm at its’ peak. I’m numb. I’m frustrated. I’m overwhelmed. I’m stressed. I’m unmotivated but strive for greatness that is always out of reach. I’m not myself. I’m not free to make mistakes, be the child that still has home in my soul, or enjoy a life outside of school anymore. It’s either live your life, but fail yourself or suffer in silence and “win” in the future. And as a kid without options, there is only one clear path to take.

The end of the day is simple. A checklist filled with assignments, of classwork that was “short enough to be done in class” and homework that took “only 25 minutes,” two dead computers, cramped up hands, an empty stomach and a lack of space from the unorganized school textbooks resided afterward. A soft-shutdown of the Chromebook is all it took to end that part of the day. I leave the crowded, dull-lighted room and school behind for the next couple of hours. To leave it behind for another time of day.

A rainbow of calm will result from this. Plants and animals, as resilient as ever, will overcome the storm and come back twice as stronger. In this world, I am a live oak tree and I will survive the storm.