The Weight of Everything by David L.
By the second week of November, Marcus had stopped going to the dining hall entirely.
It wasn’t a decision, exactly. More like a door that had slowly swung shut while he was looking the other way. First he skipped Tuesday dinner because he had a paper due. Then Thursday breakfast because the lineup was too long and the fluorescent lights made his head hurt. Then Sunday brunch because he had slept through it, or told himself he had. Then it was just easier, quieter, less.
His apartment had three empty mugs on the desk, a fourth on the windowsill growing something interesting, and a laundry pile that had migrated from the chair to the floor to a corner with ambitions. His roommate Jonah had written “food?” on a sticky note and left it on the fridge. Marcus had moved it to the counter. Then to the recycling. Then he’d taken it back out and put it on the desk, where it sat next to the mugs and the charger that only worked at a specific angle and a textbook he had carried to three different locations without opening.
Four unread emails. The most recent was from his academic advisor. Subject line: “Checking in!” The exclamation mark was doing a lot of heavy lifting.
He had a system. He was good at systems. He had a colour coded calendar, a notes app with nested folders, a spreadsheet for his assignments that he had last updated in September when the semester still felt like something he was in charge of. The spreadsheet had a tab called “Goals.” He had not opened that tab in a while.
At 2 a.m. he lay in bed running calculations that had nothing to do with his coursework. He stared at the water stain on the ceiling that looked like either a running dog or the country of France, depending on his mood. Lately it looked like France. He wasn’t sure what that meant. Probably nothing. He was an engineering student, not a psychology student, though at this particular moment neither credential felt especially convincing.
His roommate Jonah knocked sometimes, said things like “bro, you coming?” and Marcus would call back something easy and noncommittal and Jonah would leave and the hallway would go quiet. It was a very efficient arrangement. Jonah had stopped mentioning the dining hall. Marcus had noticed this without knowing what to do with the noticing.
He used to make pasta on Sunday nights. He and his high school friends used to crowd into someone’s kitchen and argue about sauce. He used to have opinions about bread. These felt like facts about a person he’d read about somewhere.
His mother called on Wednesdays. He answered, mostly. He said “yeah, good” in a variety of tones that apparently covered the full range of required information because she hadn’t pushed yet, and he was quietly grateful for this in a way that also felt terrible.
On a Thursday in late November, it sleeted. Not snowed, not rained. Sleeted, which matched the general atmosphere of the semester. Marcus sat at his desk in front of a document he had opened, stared at, and minimized four days in a row. The cursor blinked in the same spot it had been blinking since Monday. His laptop fan whirred steadily, working very hard on nothing. Outside the window, a squirrel assessed a soggy piece of something on the ledge, made a decision, and left. Marcus watched it go.
He picked up his phone. Put it down. Picked it up again.
The browser tab had been open for nine days. He knew this because he had made a point of not closing it, the way you leave a voicemail unlistened to because once you listen to it, you have to do something about it. The tab sat between his university email and a Wikipedia article about concrete he had no memory of opening.
Sheena’s Place. Free group support. No referral needed. No diagnosis required.
He read it a fifth time. Then a sixth, snagging on “no referral needed” the way you snag on a sentence that is answering a question you hadn’t admitted you were asking.
Down the hall, someone laughed at something on television. The sleet tapped the window. The laptop fan kept going.
His thumb hovered.
He pressed call.