Chapter 203

#70

The breakfast tray has been sitting on my desk since nine this morning and it is now two in the afternoon and I have not touched it, which means the eggs have progressed through several distinct phases of inedibility and are now simply a monument to my current state of mind.

I am going insane.

That is not hyperbole, that is a clinical observation about what happens to a person when you remove school, friends, freedom of movement, and meaningful human contact and replace them with four walls and an online curriculum that arrives in my inbox at eight every morning like a particularly cheerful bill.

I get up and stand in front of my mirror, mostly because I have been lying in the same position for so long that my body requires evidence that I am still three-dimensional. My eyes are swollen from the particular combination of not en