Hopelessly Senseless

It’s all so real now. People talk about going to college for months like a fog looming in

the future and then it just hits them like a ton of bricks. New friends, new school, new home.

Luckily for me, I met some of my good friends in the first few days. We already named

ourselves “the quad” because we all want to room together next year. We have a good mix of

personalities in the group. There’s Kelly, the athletic yet shy one, Natalie, the pretty yet genuine

one, Monica, the outspoken yet down to earth one, and me, the cunning yet dumb one.

So here I stand inside an 8 by 10 cinderblock room with a white floor that is so

obnoxiously bright it makes my head hurt. How am I supposed to live in this prison cell for 9

months with another person? I walk outside into the hall to take in some fresh air, the door

closing behind me. I breathe. I can do this. I turn to go back inside and I jiggle the handle which

ricochets back at me without opening the door. As I grasp it again, I am suddenly teleported back

int0 the basement guest bedroom in my house when I was 10 years old.

The door won’t open. I guess I’ll give it another try. As my hands shakily approach the

knob, I pull with all my might. Nothing. My heart begins to beat faster. How can this be

happening to me? I bang against the door. I punched the door again, this time harder than Ali

knockout Foreman. Still no budge. My heart starts pounding faster, fast enough where it is the

only thing I can hear in my head. I shriek for my mother at the top of my lungs, so loudly that my

voice cracks. I know she won’t be able to hear me but nothing will stop me.

Hopelessly giving up on gracefully exciting through the door, my eyes begin to dart

around the room for another route of escape. Then, they fall upon the answer, the home phone

birched upon the dresser. In desperation, I lunge at it, hoping to call another part of my house

and be saved from this perfect nightmare.

Nothing, I hear nothing on the other end.

The floor begins to wobble underneath me and the walls are spinning. Blackness is closing in all

around me. I’ll pass out any minute. Then I see it. It was right in front of me the whole time. The

window. I sprint towards it as the walls cave in on me. I rip off the screen and fling open the

window. I crawl out onto the stone back patio and look out triumphantly at the wilderness in my

backyard. “I survived,” I proclaim exasperatedly.

Now that I am free and relieved, new thoughts rush into my head. My fear switches to anger.

How could my mother lock me in a room and leave me like that?

I storm up the deck stairs and burst through the door into the laundry room.

With my face contorted I looked like a raving maniac. The painter in my house turns and stares

at me blankly. “I can’t believe you,” I snarl at my mother. “How could you lock me in the guest

bedroom?”

She bursts out laughing. “Lock you in the bed room? Erin, the lock is on the inside.” Stuttering

slightly, I reply, “but the lock was jammed; it wasn’t working. Then I tried the phone and it

didn’t work either.”

“Did you wait for the dial tone” she inquires. My eyes grow wide, “what dial tone?”

“You know that beeping that happens a few seconds after you pick up the phone? That’s the dial

tone.”

“Uhhh no, I didn’t even know that existed.”

“So if the door ‘wouldn’t’ open and the phone ‘wasn’t’ working, how’d you get outside?”

“I climbed out the window,” I reply casually.

My mom completely lost it. After several minutes of her laughing hysterically in my face and me

just standing there, she manages to stifle out “at least you were resourceful”. Resourceful is one

word for it, I think quietly to myself.

As the years went by, these kind of incidences kept happening. I had streak of 3 vacations

where I nearly was flattened by a car because I didn’t look both ways before I crossed the street.

I famously asked my mom if she was born an Asian because of a black and white portrait of her

as a toddler where her eyes were squinty and her hair was black. I memorably referred to myself

as a mathmagician in an advertising video for my school. I even asked my boyfriend what state

Ole Miss was in. While most people roll their eyes and laugh at my blunders, I came to embrace

them.

As I hear a girl shouting to make sure to grab her favorite pink and white scarf, I am

startled back to reality. I smile at these memories while I patiently sit outside my dorm room,

waiting for my roommate to get back. After a few minutes, I realize I should probably just find

the RA and ask if she would so kindly unlock the door for me. As I’m walking back to my room

with the RA by my side, I run into my friends. “Uh oh Erin what happened? Someone already in

trouble?” they tease. “Not yet. I just locked myself out of my room” I reply coolly. They burst

out laughing, “this will be a long semester. Maybe next time you should think to grab your key

before you leave so you wouldn’t be locked out”. “What’s the fun in that,” I smile, “then I don’t

have an excuse to spend the night on your futon”.