Instant Noodles. Lectures. Depleted EDM nightclubs. Exhaustion.

I watch Jennie stumble to her desk, barely getting by. Only, she now goes by Mary Jane, hoping this little world of her’s will one day take her seriously. I saw her leaving late last night with Michelle, who just lost her spot on the swim team last weekend.

“So much for the Olympics. From now on, the only time you’ll find me in water is drowning in debt! Business— I should’ve pursued business!”

What happened to passion? We glorified this life as juveniles. We were promised answers. Fortune. Fulfillment.

My social circle is made of hopeless, delusional nobodies—dreamers at best. They say they’ve chosen their paths to better society, but if a dream ends at making it through a semester or two only to pursue something else entirely for the sake of comfort, should it really qualify as a dream if it was never one to begin with?

What is it with wanting to “accomplish great things” when all we do is hide out amongst our kind? Either spending time competing with one another, or validating each other’s sins. Reality check: No one cares what happened within these walls. They’re watching how you handle yourself outside of it.

Now that I’m one month away from making big-kid decisions, I’ve realized it’s all been an illusion. A money hungry illusion.

It feels as if the realization hit me all at once, like a weed fueled revelation slamming into my brain at full speed. That is how most things come when you are in high school, fast and barraging and too much to handle all at once, like puberty and rumors and tests and dramas, hurtling towards your small teenage body like a bullseye. But no, this was an adult revelation—it started slow, culminating in a pile of emotional pour-out at college, seen in dreary students at raves with their heads chock-full of whatever substance was easiest to get their hands on.
It started with a question nobody wanted to ask out loud: what if none of this was ever about the thing we said it was about?

It was never about the LSAT prep books gathering dust under someone's bed, never about the audition tapes recorded and re-recorded until a voice stopped sounding like a voice and started sounding like a product. It was about the stories we had told about ourselves, the way children build elaborate identities out of Halloween costumes, and then we forgot to take the masks off.

I think about the night I saw them leaving the club, mascara streaking down in dark rivers that told the truth their mouths wouldn't. Michelle was laughing too hard at her own joke about drowning in debt, and Mary Jane just nodded along, eyes glassy in a drunken escape attempt.

That's the thing about transparency. Everyone claims to want it until it's shining a light directly on them. We could see through each other so easily, could clock the exact moment someone's dream curdled into a fallback plan, could smell the desperation under the Fireball breath and the borrowed confidence, but none of us turned that same unflinching gaze inward. It's always easier to diagnose the collective delusion than to admit you're patient zero.

I used to think I was different. That's the most juvenile thing about this whole story, the part I'm least proud of: I sat in my dorm room journaling about their illusions like I wasn't a couple exams and a bad semester away from becoming exactly what I was writing about. Transparency, it turns out, is a mirror nobody wants held up for too long. You get one good look and then you start smashing up the glass so the reflection doesn't catch you at a bad angle.