Her mind was getting lazy... feeling sleepy... tired of thinking... Spring was there and it was getting warm and sunny. During the courses she felt tired, as if it was all happening in one of her strange dreams. Linguistics lectures, literature lectures... during which she’d take notes automatically, absent from the whole understanding thing. She was unable to concentrate. She sat there at a desk, listening without completely hearing, looking at the crowd of new people she’d first seen in her first semester there at University. She hadn’t been able to know them all, and during the lectures she’d often sit alone at a desk, wondering how she had ended up there among those strangers. The weeks were passing and she hadn’t been able to read her notes before the following lectures, so she was hearing a whole new, foreign language spoken in the majority of the lectures she attended, let alone the seminars, where she’d feel like an outsider during the morphology exercises. She had been unable to read any book for the literature seminars. She had tried, but she wasn’t able to focus and while in the midst of reading she’d realize that her thoughts were far away somewhere in a world having nothing to do with the book. She’d just read words, not able to link them together so that they’d form a coherent idea.

While waiting for the previous lecture to end so that she could go into the lecture hall, she’d wander along the halls feeling lost, confused about her life, worrying over what she was going to do about the huge bibliographies she hadn’t even properly started reading. She felt tired. She had lost, it seemed to her, touch with reality and she needed to return to reality, only she was too tired to do this. She had fallen in a strange state of tiredness mixed with a dreamy mood, wishing to escape reality and take a rest from this real world.

She felt too tired to keep a conversation, a short dialogue with any of her new colleagues. The huge mass of unknown figures made her feel tired, together with their continuous chattering.

The lectures were becoming an amorphous mass. She’d get lost in a foreign land, not understanding that foreign language. Hearing and understanding had grown far apart, till they got separated.

She had been reproached of walking on the university halls like a sleepwalker. She’d also been compared to a drunk person, absent-minded as she had grown, sometimes forgetting about certain things.

Now, as she walked on the same hallways, almost four years later, she believed that even then, she had had a sense that she was meant to graduate anyway and that nothing truly disastrous was going to happen to her. Her first-year very first semester had gone fine with the exams, but this was followed by a period of terrible confusion. She had not been able to organize and get her studying done, too many subjects had crowded upon her, and in a way they had not been stimulating enough to get her interested. The first semester she had been avidly interested in everything, and in the second she felt somehow disappointed. She couldn’t get herself in the mood to live in those epoques, in those novels. And this made her feel bad, somehow depressed, and tired. A feeling of emptiness was taking hold of her... while waiting for the bus, while walking on the streets, while wandering along the university’s hallways, feeling lost... a feeling of emptiness coupled with a feeling of sadness, feeling the need to cry because she felt so lost... not knowing what to do, not knowing how she was going to solve her problem with the exams...

During the Linguistics lectures she wasn’t able to follow the explanations, she’d look on her notes at home and not be able to truly understand the issues there and would put her notes aside. It was as though her mind had not gotten dark, but there was somewhere a sun that shone a much too bright light which managed to blind her understanding. Just like the spring sun was shining its light over her desk from the window and make her sight uncomfortable, feeling lost in the golden luminosity. She was almost always choosing to sit at the same desk in the lecture hall where she attended her Morphology lecture. By the window, from where she could see a block of flats. The desk was rather a far distance from the teacher and the blackboard, and sometimes she would wonder why had she chosen that place, as it made her feel even further apart from understanding what was going on in class. The voice of the teacher had a pleasant sound to her... she was definitely a smoker, judging by her voice, somebody told her later... but the strong, husky voice had something pleasant in it... and the way she referred to her students, as "kiddies..." The girl liked that.

She had realized in desperation that she was twenty years old. An adult. And she didn’t know where to go. Leaving her home aside. Nothing, a blank. And she still had trouble understanding her lectures. An adult by her age, yet feeling more confused than ever...

She had somehow disseminated herself. Her mind, her thoughts, her attention, her ability to organize and to concentrate. In her mind, she was mixing past and present, these tense just got rolled into one. Broken pieces of past memories from the first semester, teachers’ voices, fragments of lectures she had attended... teachers she hadn’t met again in the second semester and whom she was missing then, with their favourite expressions... Voices from the past, though having faded away, now regained their colours and sounds... Time passing and changing even her, her getting old... yet remaining still a child inside...

The second semester then had passed as if she’d been riding in a race car. It had been physically shorter as a duration as well. So there was something of a logical explanation to it... Midterm at Morphology was announced... she panicked... she cried that she couldn’t go and take the exam... She knew she didn’t stand a chance, as everything was a blur in her mind... "It’s too much," she thought, meaning too much stuff to cover and too little time left for her to understand and remember all those verb classifications.

That had been the most disastrous exam session... and the most difficult for her. She had sought for encouragement from her former English teacher, whom she had known since she were only twelve or thirteen years old and who had helped her to get where she was then. She was encouraged and kindly told that it was just a phase she was going through and it will pass...

It did pass... but it still had her puzzled over it... as it didn’t make much sense to her even now, as a fresh graduate student. The whole thing she’d gone through was still unexplainable to her. And it had her rather confused as she’d gone through her second year, feeling still overwhelmed by the quantity of studying she had to go over...

She thought she would never be able to pull herself together after the dissemination she’d gone through during the second semester of her first year. And there had been leftovers of it during her second year...

And the way she’d struggle with herself to put a few coherent sentences on paper during her exams she had to take again in the autumn, at the end of her first year... and the big effort that took her to form one sentence... and the rather poor grade which confirmed her insecurity and confusion... Thoughts getting lost in her mind, or not being strong enough to reach their final form, or simply her mind too blurred to distinguish them in the fog... Difficulty of expressing herself... A crazy syntax forming in her mind, stuffed with sentences ending in ellipses, a broken syntax... broken thoughts...

Her own personality – a mixture of gestures, favourite expressions of others around her... WHO was she, actually?...

She woke up and she graduated. Just as illogically.

The train he was supposed to arrive by had already arrived at the station by seven o’clock that morning. And it was already over nine o’clock a.m.

She had woke up and looked around the living-room, trying to see some suitcases, some clothes, an unmade bed that could have been a sign that he had arrived. She had seen none of those. She had found her mother in the kitchen, and asked her an obviously unnecessary question, "Hasn’t he arrived?" but it was the only thing she was able to say at the moment.

Deep down, she knew that he was supposed to arrive back home somehow. It was one of those unexplainable feelings she’d get when the situation appeared logically hopeless, but something like a sixth sense would tell her that nothing had gone wrong.

Her mother had phoned at the train station. They both knew her father was supposed to return that morning.

The girl was worried too, but something inside her kept her hoping, even reassuring her that it had already been decided, but an accident was in no way part of the script.

She felt her mother’s worries and anxieties, by the way she’d move about the living-room. She herself did not know what to make of it any more, she sat by her bed and looked at the graduation exam programme, a feeling she could not name getting hold of her.

Silence. An anxious silence. No words. None of the two spoke. Were they waiting for something? They probably didn’t know...

Feelings of fear were felt in the air. And this tense waiting in every corner...

Two persons sitting in different rooms... not talking... just sharing a silence full of anxiety...

The phone’s ringing suddenly made itself heard all over the house. The girl’s mother ran to the kitchen. The girl waited, tensed, to infer who had called. It was her father! He had decided to take another train... and was to arrive a bit later that day...