2:46 in the morning. I'm still awake, watching as the lights of the city outside my window begin to fade into the impending sunlight bleeding from the distant ground, threatening to stain the water reds and oranges and yellows, and paint the snow on the ground with a fresh coating of diamonds. Jenny's asleep, anxiously waiting for the first of twelve alarms and two phone calls that will beckon her to a day of social panic and desperate attempts to please a series of RAs who have no real idea what it is they want out of the fifty nervous freshmen they'll have lined up in front of them. Every click of the keys threatens to wake her, pushing her onto her side, pulling her back to face the ceiling, forcing quiet sighs from her lungs. I feel like something is eating me from the inside out, scratching at the inside of my skin, trying to find a way into the coming daylight. In the red glow of the digital clock on the microwave, these thoughts awaken, begging to be freed. Only at 2:53 do they seem to take on a form, twisting into words, clawing around in the depths of my mind for a body that suits them. It's a perpetual game of hide and seek; as soon as it feels like a word fits, they slip like smoke through my skinny fingers, floating away instead of flowing into my diary and out of me. They're torturing me slowly. The elusive things never disappear, they just cycle, pretending to be gone for a moment before surprising me at the most unexpected of times. The finger is perpetually on the trigger, ready to fire them back into my chest and throw me to the ground at any moment. And the finger clenches at the most simple of occurrences: the green staircase of the building he studies in, the patch of concrete floor in the room where we met, the discussion of a type of African wood from which a guitar pick will be fashioned, the question of what I'll do when asked to declare my future in three weeks, the man walking in the opposite direction across the street, the curb in front of the supply store. The ghosts of feelings are always present, always ready to strike. They know how to destroy, they know how to drive me insane. They blind me when I look in the face of the guy who claims to like me, they numb me when my best friends tell me they love me. They wake me when I lie in my bed, whispering in my ear that I am alone regardless of where I sleep or who with. Because they know what I know. As the quiet of the night outside rides through my fifth-storey window on the cold wind, I can hear his breath, and every ounce of my being is overwhelmed with the comprehension of one simple truth: somewhere in this city he exists. The one who crushes the tattered remains of my composure on the sidewalk beneath his shoes, grinding them into the pavement. The one who makes my voice take hold of the sides of my