
“It’ll be alright”
Ridden by pressing anxiety, Marie lets herself down on the bed.
“It’ll be alright.” She chanted.
Of course, questions creep up after that. Marie considered wondering why it was that she did not have friends. It is not easy to have friends. At least now that she is an academic, people do not really feel comfortable talking to her.
“I feel like you know a lot and it’s just not possible for me to keep up with you these days.” a friend of hers blurted out the other day.
Marie reaches out for the bottle beside her bed. It was empty. She slumps and thinks why she isn’t paying attention to her life. Why is nothing in place? Her supervisor had mentioned that she needed to see things clearly. It was back when she was a Ph.D. Candidate. Was he pointing at something more basic?
It just kept going backward. Her boyfriend, Jules, used to get fed up with her anxiety. Of course, Jules is now happily married to someone she knew. A friend of hers. The world is really small.
“It’ll be alright.” She whispered.
The words seemed to tease her anxiety. Now she was having thoughts about jumping. The window was open, the curtain flying. As if an invitation.
“This is not possibly happening” Marie thought.
The friends wouldn’t know. She wasn’t good at hiding, but she tried really hard not to show her wounds. At work, she felt her colleagues really knew more than her. She felt belittled by how little she really knew.
“But I’ve come a long way”
“Yes, but the path seems to stretch further.”
Marie tried balancing whether she had a life. Maybe she had one, which she certainly couldn’t appreciate. Perhaps, there was more value in what she knew about Bio-chemistry, yet, the people, the things that she valued seemed to have disappeared from her life. This wasn’t what she was expecting when she had signed up. Loneliness was creeping up all over her body.
She was now sitting on the window pane.
“I thought I was going to be alright. But looks like I am going to be a news tomorrow.”
Marie looked down and felt crazy to think that this is how she was going to end her life.
—
At 8.49 AM Marie wakes up and realizes she’s late for lab again.

