3:12 AM
I find myself slouching towards a Kamvas 13 that has been abused for five years. In my peripheral vision, the dust collected at the back of the stand is thick enough to form a grey sandbox in the dirty plastic. Yet it has been this disgusting for months. If I remember correctly, the last time it was cleaned was back in June of last year when I was packing my equipment home for the summer, and the dust and hair was gross enough to finally sweep off with a single ply tissue.
Yet the worst of that was the screen itself. The truth is, despite wasting 500 dollars on this screen tablet, I rarely draw these days and only use it as a second monitor to watch YouTube videos while playing games on the primary screen. When I do feel a sudden motivation to draw, or if deadlines for a project are due, the black dust collected on the screen sticks onto my sweaty palms. Just before that, the pen fails to register the input as the working area defaults to the primary screen.
When it finally happens, I draw the same garbage again. An anime eye, the other less rounded eye, and a vague T-shape for a cute girly face. Then I finally feel tired enough to go to bed. But the disappointment from doing nothing but watching YouTube for the whole day hits, and a spike of anxiety motivates me to stare at the canvas for five minutes doing nothing. My head spins.
In my head, it feels productive. Because without drawing, I already imagined the pose and perspective of the character. Along with the pose is a vague long-range weapon, a staff that swings around without a purpose, and silhouettes of enemies of a vague story arc that is barely explored. I should be using this to sketch a storyboard, but I was too lazy to switch to a sketch brush. An undeserved break happens as I rest my back by laying in bed, the bottom half as I feel uncomfortable sleeping without taking a shower right before. For the next ten minutes, the dim ceiling is illuminated by the light at the study desk. Shit, I need to buy more food for the rest of the week.
Londis should still be open, so I use the excuse of buying groceries to leave my dusty dorm. Some of the first years are playing FIFA in the common room. The common room reeks of alcohol as they run around doing something. Fuck, I open my banking app to convert more British pounds for a late night run. It had 0.13 pounds left, as I used the last ten pounds for laundry two days ago.
Fuck my life, I login to the other banking app to convert currency. The habit of transferring 200 every week was learned when I still received allowance from my parents in the first month of university. I found a decent part time job the second month, before the tutoring agency shut down earlier this year. It was so easy taking advantage of rich parents who migrate their children here with paid IELTS scores, teaching them basic English was so easy if they were not studying for a national exam. I still grieve over that job.
Sometimes I envy people who still rely on their parents in university, but I can never complain about a grave I chose to dig into. I knew way before enrolling into university that neither of them could fund my studies. I vowed to never succumb to their vices, yet I probably inherited this trait with my career path. In spite of having 20 years to witness financial blunders first hand with most of the adults I met growing up being loan collectors and snake oil sellers, I decided to kill myself with an international student loan for an art school in the 2020s. Because at age 20, I genuinely treated this as a suicide plan. Yet three years later, I am too afraid to die.
Wearing a 108 yuan black coat that does nothing to protect me from the wind, I leave the residential area towards the busier street. Then I realized, it's only 10pm. Worse than my perception of time is my ability to check the weather, because I never open the opaque curtains to glance outside before leaving my room. The hood from the cheap coat does nothing to protect my bedhead from the rain as stands of black hair begin poking into my eyes as I attempt to navigate with blurry glasses.
Since it is only 10.30pm, I opt to shop at a nearby Tesco instead. The security guard removes my hood before letting me into the store, and I waste my money buying water for 85p, then waste even more money on a meal deal since I had been too lazy to enter the shared kitchen for days to avoid interacting with my flatmates, for absolutely no reason. I avoid buying bread because white bread is associated with mold that grows from a humid childhood home and other groceries that spoil from bulk buying out of budgetary reasons. I avoid buying vegetables because the smell of rotting spinach and lettuce in the fridge still disgusts me today. I avoid buying meat because it is too time-consuming and expensive to prepare. Not to mention, frozen meat stinks the entire freezer. Instead, all I bought was milk, water, and oatmeal.
The phone reads 8.19pm. I was buying groceries on the walk home from the tube station. Right before this, I was sending my relatives home from the airport. Relatives? It was just one person. My aunt was worried about me and wanted me to record videos on my walk home. Why, though, it is still early, is it not? I check my phone again, it is 8.20pm. Instead of recording videos, I think she just wanted me to take photos of my walk back, right? I can barely remember instructions that are not important, but I doubt I need to record an entire walk back and waste storage on my phone. I was probably imagining what I would do tonight while zoning out on the Bakerloo line, bored to death without reception. Not that it matters, I still have roughly a year before graduating. The rain has subsided and my vision clears. My heart tenses a little while glancing around the unusually empty street, cold wind cleaning my glasses.
The moon is radiating and beautiful, a reddish-yellow glow amplified by the surrounding clouds with a rainbow halo. The phone camera easily detects it after a 10x zoom, and I send a blurry vague image to my aunt like a kid giving their parents an ugly drawing they made in school. The wind fades a little, and the clouds shift slower in the pitch black sky. Thin scraps of cloud float over the moon.
That was the moment it looked at me. A bloodshot eye in black nothingness. It was just dark clouds in the night covering the core and top half of the moon. At this point, I wish I had the vocabulary to explain what I saw. I know it was just clouds. Yet, it still...
It keeps staring at me. Walking towards the student hall felt like walking towards this demon in the sky, eyes half shut as it looked down on me. The wind persists, and it shifts its focus to another human walking across the street. Then its second iris appears to look straight at me again.
"Have you finally found an internship?" It asks in my head. It does not have a voice but I picture the text behind my eyes.
I stare at it to signal that I have not, despite sending 20 applications this week.
"Don't starve yourself, you can always ask for money from them, they wouldn't want you to starve."
Yet it is my prime fantasy to collapse in the middle of the street, just like my second night out in London when my drink was spiked and I dozed off in an empty road at 2am, probably. I often fantasize about claiming the insurance I paid for before learning about the additional NHS fees during the visa application, otherwise I would have had an additional two grand in savings if it was not for that company preying on lonely international students.
"You suck at rhetorical questions."
I know, I just need to organise my thoughts. Finally, the moon is completely obscured by the clouds. I ignore the yellow streaks of light in the sky and briskly walk to the security post. When I am finally safe in the dorms, I check my phone. It is a message from my aunt:
"You live 30 minutes away from the station?"