The Sadness of Impermanence

You watch the smoke wafting from her lips and she buzzes with nervous excitement, her eastern-European tinged accent breaks through air, bouncing off the windows glaring down at you, all in a row. Why aren’t you studying? They ask.
You look at the sky. It’s funny how its when you’re experiencing the greatest nerve-wrecking moments is when you feel the most alive. The air stings. The colours are sharper. Sounds are more distinct
She says she feels like a hunted animal. She studied for twelve hours yesterday but today she’s forgotten how to think. She rattles off case law and ridicules a shipments of ant eggs, the Polish name of a petitioner she can’t pronounce, while the boys talk about competition and conflict of laws.
Sighs. At least you’re not a commercial lawyer.
How do we get ourselves in these situations? So far from home. Biding our time until this. The exam periods. Critical stages. We’re faux surgeous undertaking one of the most important procedures of your lives.
But you’re appreciative. These last instances of scholarly strain. The last exam period to end all exam periods. The law finals. Never again.
Among books and binders and stapled documents, you’re scanning notes obsessively. As if photocopying with speediness and with the utmost efficiency will help you at all. As if it will absolve you.
You were told lawyers were from hell. They are, really, but only because they’re put through it.
—-
She’s in her exam right now along with some of your other course mates. Eyes darting across questions. Hands scribbling in fluid motion. Anxious feet tapping as the clock ticks. That will annoy her.
If anyone distracts me during the exam, she said. I’ll punch them. I need to concentrate.
She would too. She’s like that.
You’re incredibly nervous for her. Your own exam is in two days.
We’ll be okay, we’ve been told by others, while smoking under the porch light of the building where we live. We don’t respond. We just smoke away. We don’t really know what else to do. So we keeping smoking away.
Smoking away the weather. Smoking away the exams. Smoking away this city. Smoking away this life.

The best (and probably only good) thing about geese is that they don’t care how much you loathe them. They go about doing their business; eating, swimming, shitting, biting you when they feel the urge, interfering with your morning running routine by walking in front of you on right when they see you coming.
Geese don’t care. And that’s the greatest. Because I feel that if they truly realized how much people despised them, they’d crawl into a hole and never come out. They’d go extinct. Refusing to reproduce, to create more of their own despised kind. They’d spend hours writing morose poetry, crying to the emotional therapist who is fed up and is quite obviously not listening any more, his impatient eyes darting to the clock every minute, his nostrils flaring at the stench of murky pond. He wishes he could speak goose. He wishes he could tell the goose to fuck off.
If a goose were like a person, it’d be the most annoying person. The one that overstays, the one that gets in the way, the one that recounts stories that you’ve already heard twice, thrice, four times sometimes. Not that geese ever talk. But that’s the feeling you get when you’re around a goose
I’m impatient with geese. Maybe most people don’t dislike them as much as I but I know. It’s only for a lack of exposure.
They’re a nuisance. Pests. The things you chase just to chase just because you don’t like them. And you’re 24 now so you must really not like them. The things you want out to get out of the frame, so you can take a photo of flowers and those beautiful swans.
They don’t know. These geese. If they knew, they’d become anorexic, induce bulimia, suffer from body dysmorphia. Swan jealousy. They’d cry into their pillows every night.
But really though, it’s a biological advantage for geese to be so apathetic towards my feelings. That’s the only way they survive. It’s the only way they do better than survive. They do great.
Their beady eyes, glaring right back at me. Assessing me. Judging me.
They’re awful, these geese.