4:30 PM
After the last bell rang, I couldn't get out of that building fast enough. I didn't even wait for Maya because I knew she'd want to go to the mall and look at shoes, and my brain just wasn't ready for that kind of energy. Instead, I walked three blocks over to The Dusty Bean. It's this tiny coffee shop that smells like roasted beans and old cinnamon, and they play jazz music so quiet you can barely hear it. I ordered a hot chocolate with extra marshmallows—because I'm an adult who makes my own choices, okay?—and found a small table in the very back corner. The wood of the table is all scratched up and has someone's initials carved into the side. I like thinking about who sat here before me and what kind of secrets they were writing down.
6:15 PM
I've been sitting here for nearly two hours, and I finally feel like I can breathe again. I pulled out my chemistry notebook, but I wasn't looking at the periodic table. I started doodling these strange, swirling patterns around the edges of my page, and then I wrote a few lines of a poem that had been stuck in my head since history class. It's about how the streetlights look like fallen stars when they reflect in the puddles on the ground. It sounds kind of cheesy when I say it out loud, but on paper, it felt real. The barista, a guy with messy hair and a cool apron, brought me a free cookie because it was "broken and couldn't be sold." It was still warm and tasted like heaven. Sometimes, people are actually a lot nicer than you expect them to be.
8:45 PM I'm back home now, and the "real world" is starting to creep back in. My mom asked me how my day was, and I just said "fine" because explaining the onion cells or the feeling of the coffee shop just felt like too much work. How do you tell someone that your favorite part of the day was sitting in a corner by yourself? I'm looking at my chemistry notebook now, and I realized I actually did leave a little bit of a mess. There's a tiny chocolate smudge on the page where I wrote my poem. I think I'll leave it there. It's like a little memory of a quiet afternoon.
11:15 PM
I'm lying in bed, and for the first time in a while, I don't feel like I'm just waiting for the plot to start. Maybe the plot isn't a big explosion or a movie-style romance. Maybe the plot is just a girl in a green sweater, drinking cocoa and writing poems in a notebook that's supposed to be for science. I'm going to try to sleep without looking at my phone tonight. I want to see if I can have a dream that's as interesting as the world inside my head.