The clock is counting down the fifteen minutes until a production meeting for the year's first show. I'm assistant costume designing with another girl. Calling her Hellen would be apropos.

I should be excited about the beginning of my senior year in college, but I'm not. At some point, maybe I was. Maybe I wanted to come back to this obnoxious blue and green room, but a thousand reasons discourage me.

I've been dreaming of blue and yellow flags, long, and forked like the tongues of snakes. They rise on steel flagpoles from a shallow pool of the brightest aquamarine in the middle of a barren and dying pasture under a cold sky. I watch them from a very tall wooden house, an aging structure with whispers of the Tudor fashion in the remaining details. I am perched on the unstable railing of the balcony and the wood bends and groans under the pressure. I'm not afraid of falling.

A fumbled and messy ritual, a long and peaceful silence, the vibration of a phone, the slam of a door and lumbering footsteps across the floor. This is not where I want to be.