Anxiety Blanket

I always feel sick when I am at school. It begins to set in my mind during the 15 minute walk from my house to the school’s main entrance. It was snowing today, and I managed to walk the whole distance without raising my head once to the spilling heavens. I walked this route 5 days a week and knew it like the back of my hand.
The sickness today was affecting me stronger than others. I think I know that it is psychological, but it feels entirely physical. I have come to sipping water in aid of this. Today is my 2nd day of reading Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar and I am on page 184. The occasional mention of food is making my stomach churn.
I have an anxiety disorder; this is the explanation for the sickness. It began 7 years ago when I was just 10. I refused to eat or go to school, my mother and brother had to literally drag me from my bed, but I still refused to do either. Even writing this right now I can feel the non-existing contents of my stomach rising. The anxiety had worsened recently, much to my delight.
I’m sitting in the huge, open art area writing this right now. The thing about this space is that there are these huge windows that fill the whole back wall that you could see right to the other end of town from. The fields and town buildings were all lying under a thick layer of velvety snow. When I feel like I am going to puke, I walk over to these windows and look at the snow and for a very brief moment, it calms my mind.
The urge to walk downstairs, sign out and walk home in this velvet downpour was overwhelming. The only thing putting slight hesitation in my mind was that I had done this uncountable times before, so much so that every call we get to the house I think it’s the bitchy office last calling to rat me out. I wouldn’t put it past her.
There were two women that worked in the pupil office, that we called the fishbowl. I do not know why.
Miss Moody was a large woman, at least 6”0. She wore large, old-fashioned glasses in front of blue-grey eyes. She wore her wiry black hair at her shoulders, unbrushed, with a choppy fringe that brushed the top of her spectacles. One of her eyes was slightly narrower than the other and when she flashed her crooked teeth into a pirate smile only one eye remained open. Her voice was so monotone it left a drone in my ears after she spoke to me.
I keep glancing out the window to ensure the snow was still falling. “If my security blanked was to vanish, I will go home”, I told myself.
The other lady was lovely. She had cropped, artificially auburn hair that was styled into small flicks and was tousled with texture. She had bird like, delicate features and the biggest smile was always stretched across her skinny face. She knew my name, and I always have a soft spot for teachers that remember my name.
The idea of home is all I can think about right now. When I left this morning, Sonny, my abnormally large cat, had secured a spot on my freshly made bed of brand new white sheets. He had scattered dirty paw prints all over it in the process, but I didn’t mind.
How easy a cat’s life must be. So leisurely and carefree. I would often wish I was one whenever I left for school in primary, as the cat would always be coiled like a snake in the corner of the stair banister when I was leaving. We have always had a cat around. My first cat, Ginger, both name and colour, saved me from a wasp when I was 4, and after that my love for cats was undying. Unfortunately our cats always leave this earth in a most brutal fashion, often being crushed to death on the busy road that lay at the front of my house. The number of cat spirits in the garden is uncountable. We took the burial of the cats very seriously, I even attempted to carve out their names in slates.

The sky hangs like a heavy grey belly, fully enough to burst, and burst it did, and had been doing for several hours. I can’t see it giving up any time soon.
I thought I was right in thinking that this is how every teen thinks of school once they hit 5th year, dubbed “the worst and most important year of your life”, just to ease the pressure. It soon became apparent that this was not common thinking, when I thought it was impossible to complete a full day of school without going home, but people thinking I’m crazy and lazy every time I told them I was going home. I am realising now that I do it to excess, but it seems normal to me now. A full day of school is unthinkable, unbearable… Impossible even.

The snow is still falling, creating layer upon layer of slowly expanding white ice blankets. Whenever it snows, my longing to live in New York grows dramatically. I sit at my desk window reading a book while watching the silent snow flutter down from the sky from the corner of my eye simultaneously. There this, or there’s running a bath, painfully hot so that my foot flinches when it touches the peaceful water, speckled with slower petals and the scent of muscle relaxer salts filtrating my nostrils and I hesitantly lower my cold body into the steaming water… What I wouldn’t give to be in that heavenly cove than sitting in art, freezing and perching on the edge of the unsteady and backless science chair.

Maybe I’ll walk. I’ll walk. I’ll walk down the echoing school stairs, avoiding the germ-laden freezing pole banisters. I’ll walk through the drafty corridor, past the music classrooms where first years bang relentlessly on the delicate xylophones, turning them into screeching torture boards of sound. I’ll walk to the fish bowl, grab a yellow slip, “sore head, sore tummy, nausea”, is what I will write. Then I’ll walk down the school path and let the little snowflakes land on my already running nose, and let them collect gracefully on the pompom of my hat. I’ll walk home, finally, finally.