You are no longer homeless. You live in an apartment with two girls who almost have the same name and sometimes you ride the elevator up and down when you think nobody's paying attention because you have little else to do. You go to college for one hour, two hours, three hours. Always one hour at a time, counting counting counting. If you can make one, you can make one more. You don't talk much. You never do. You meet a girl in the hallway, and she tells you that she'll talk to you when you're done, which is an invitation to go and find her afterwards, and to be in somebody else's company, somebody who might actually want you there. But once you're done, you leave, faster than you can, and you tell little lies to anybody that you might meet so you don't have to hang around. Maybe you might have to be somewhere, you tell them. You get in the car. You drive in the direction of home again and you get stuck sitting in traffic for far too long, but somehow it's okay, sometimes you pray for more people to be boxed in around you, and you're crazy, maybe, but it's the only time of the day that you don't have to feel too alone. You're in transit. You're on your way to something better, something incredible. You're on your way to sit in silence with somebody who cares, and understands. You are on your way to somebody that you might still care about, and somebody that you might just understand. Somebody who gets your jokes, even though you don't finish your sentences anymore. They just know. It's one of those feel-good lies. You get back to the apartment and you lie on you bedroom floor, only because you don't want to mess the covers, but then you stand up and lie on the bed anyway, because you have nothing better to do. In the end, you have to fix the covers, and here, now, you have passed twenty minutes. And then you repeat. Only another twenty three hours and twenty minutes to pass until this day is done. You get a shower, your second shower of the day, because the first time you didn't shave your legs properly. The first time, you nicked your ankle in the same place that you always do, and you gave up and washed the shampoo and soap away. You mess the covers for a third time, and your hair is dripping wet. It's growing, finally, after you shaved it all off five months ago because somehow, it seemed like the best idea you'd ever had. You lie on your messed up covers and you wonder, once again, about relationships, not so much of the romantic kind, but relationships in general. The ones you mentioned earlier, the "Hey, I get you, let's be a part of each other's lives, let's mess each other's bedsheets" kind of relationships, and how everything's always so good at first because you find things that you like, and then things that you think you like, and things that you almost like, and then you get sick of all the things that you like, and you realise you've never liked the things you thought you did, and that they never changed enough to make the things you almost liked into things that you do like, and it's a mess and you almost dislike each other, but that would be difficult, so you go on believing that there is something good in there somewhere, but you spend so much time having fun together that you don't have time to sit down and realise why your heart doesn't skip any beats anymore. So maybe this is why you creep out at night, why you check your pockets and you count your change wondering if you might just have enough for twenty Marlboro lights even though you gave up right about the time you cut your hair. You fall four bucks short, and you can't decide if you're glad or not. You wish he'd call, you wish he'd text, you wish he'd send a paper airplane. You wish he'd apologise for that time back at the start of summer where you called and you told him that you were in love with him, and he told you that it was okay, that he doesn't blame you. You drive past his house, the clock on the dash reading sometime after midnight, and you wish his driveway wasn't so long so you could see if his black car is there or not. You wish to torture yourself, and you wonder about other girls. The ones that call him to tell him that they're in love with him. The ones that he loves too. You cry because that's how he found you, all those years ago, and he told you that you were pretty and that it was okay to cry sometimes, but that it's not okay to cry all the time. These tears are the 'sometimes' tears. There are no 'all the time' tears anymore. At least that's what you'd tell him if he asked. You continue driving, the roads emptier now, and you remember that time that you walked up to a stranger on a crowded street in another country, when all the nightclubs were letting out, and you told him that you once tried to kill yourself, and he laughed and said that he did too, and then you walk away and you don't tell him your name. You wonder why you have this affliction, this sadness that feeds from your loneliness, which in turn feeds from your sadness, and you think you wish it to leave, but you're not sure. You wonder if other people really don't see the beauty in everything, and you wonder how and why. Some of them look like you. Some of them have brown eyes and short hair and wear feather earrings and somehow they don't care. You let the 'sometimes' tears fall. You're home. You ride the elevator once to get to the second floor. You unlock the door, you lock the door, and you brush your teeth. You undress and you sleep, and you tell yourself that you want to wake up in the morning. You fall asleep hoping that you believe yourself.