-In the coffee shop, the on-campus coffee shop, not the one where you’d meet your friends to hold study sessions, but the one you seldom visited because it was usually overcrowded, you immediately felt the shift in temperature. Now it felt like your skin was thawing at a radioactive frequency. And in that second, as the door was yet to shut behind you-the two of you-you closed your eyes and wondered if this was what food felt in the microwave. The thought was drowned in the sound of water falling. You honed in on it and realized it was not the sound of the rain splashing against the ground outside, or the water clashing against the storefront windows, but it was in fact the sound of water dripping, not from a faucet, but from your sweatshirt, the same sweatshirt you thought would protect you that day as it had every other day since you had bought it.
You felt a nudge. Your eyes opened and you saw she was talking to you.
“So are you going to buy me coffee, or nap standing up?”
“L-l-l-let mme j-just g-go to…,” you started saying and felt that your face had become inebriated with the cold.
She didn’t let you finish. She smiled and nodded, pointing in the direction of the lavatories. Again, you tried to smile, thought you smiled, but couldn’t feel any movement on your face, and you shivered as you walked in the direction she pointed. With each step you felt the puddles in your shoes swish and splash against the leather insoles. Your socks were no longer stuck to the skin on your feet, but still they clung to them as if they were. The weight of water.
In the bathroom, you stood at the mirror, and through the blur, all you could see was a tall pale bluish figure, soaked, all of the defenses of clothing defeated by the downpour. The image made you want to jerk back. You felt the sensation of jerking in your neck and up your spine, but you didn’t budge, you didn’t so much as sway a little. So you stared. You stared and you blinked. The image became blurrier and blurrier, until you started regaining some focus. First in the center of your eye, like little peepholes, until your sight was restored, with the exception of the corners through which you could distinguish nothing.
You bent your arms and raised your shoulders several times and let them fall. You became aware of the warmth you had felt begin to take effect, not that you felt warm, but you could ball up your fist again. Quickly, or so you thought, you took off your sweatshirt and held it out in front of you over the sink, your back pack falling to the ground in the process. It weighed in your hands, your sweatshirt. You set it down on the sink’s ledge and twisted it, trying to wring it dry. You were amazed at the amount of water that wrung from it. You tried picking it up and still you could feel the water weight. You wrung it over the sink once more and once again you were amazed. You slipped it on, and your shoulders rose to their usual height. The water weight gone, down the sink.
You felt lighter as you bent over to pick up your backpack. It felt heavy, as if filled with textbooks, but by its shape on the ground, you realized it was empty. You realized you had left your textbooks where you last used them, on your desk, highlighters and post it notes holding the place of verses and lines of text you had attempted to memorize and understand the night before. Picking up the backpack, you squeezed out the water, over the same sink. This time you laughed at how so little water was drained from it and yet the weight of it, as you had picked it up from the ground, was gone. You placed it over your shoulders and it weighed your shoulders a little, but they retained their height.
You took a bundle of paper towels and dried your face and hair, before you went back outside.
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