By Morgan Armitage
Sports Editor 

It is week eight of spring term as I write this. My teachers are talking about finals already. As I walked into class this morning, my sociology professor asked if anyone had started their final essay yet. 

I have not.

Week 11 feels so far away even though I know it’s close, like a long walk off a short paper.

And I am so tired. 

I’ve been doing this whole school thing a long time, you know? And in all that time, I have never counted down the days, the weeks, till it would end.

Breaks were always a surprise to me. Summer could start in two months or two days, I’d never know. It was just another thing to keep track of. So I didn’t. But now I’m a sophomore in college. And man, I’m so tired. 

I’ve got a schedule. I’ve struck a careful balance between function and hardly functional, where I am teetering on the top of a stick that can break or slip out from under me at any odd moment. 

I can’t help but think about how long I’ve been in school, wobbling on the stick between too much and too little. I feel like I have to run to keep up, yet if I move too fast, I’ll fall and the world will keep turning without me.

I’m taking 21 credits this term, which—believe it or not—is less than last term’s 22. On Mondays and Wednesdays, I go straight from class to work as a writing tutor. Between helping students, I do my own homework. On Tuesdays after class, it’s straight to practice.

And Thursdays, I work the opening shift as a barista, attend a tutoring meeting and go off to practice again. Then Friday through Sunday, I’m just a barista. And I do it all over again. 

In high school, people used to ask me all the time, “How do you manage all of that?” School, work, volleyball. I only have two answers.

“I don’t know,” or, “I don’t.”

And I don’t, really. Something always has to give. Usually it’s the social time that goes first. I stop texting my friends, I don’t see them for weeks on end. Then it’s the personal time. Everyone starts talking about movies I don’t have time to see, and places I don’t have time to go. 

I don’t even remember what a day off feels like. 

Burnout doesn’t hit like a train. It’s a slow breath of wind not quite strong enough to snuff a candle, but not quite weak enough to go unnoticed. The wick keeps burning and the wind keeps blowing, but the fire can’t last forever.

I know I’m not the only one. 

I can see it on the faces of my peers, the slant of exhaustion pulling at the edges of their eyes, the hard sighs week after week knowing more work is to come. 

All I can hear is the voice of the girl in my sociology class, a chant in the back of my head saying, “I just want to go home.”

I just want to go home. 

But the world keeps turning, and so will I, in this final push of my community college career.

In just a few weeks I will have my Associate’s of Fine Arts degree and I will transfer to a university, where I will go to school, work and play volleyball.And somehow, in a fashion that no one will ever fully understand, I will balance some more.

Although it doesn’t feel worth celebrating, I will take a moment and acknowledge all that I have done, and all that I will do. I will smell a rose, stomp in a creek, sit under a tree and think.

I will shield my candle from the wind, and the world will keep turning.

I will breathe, briefly. And when the next fall term comes around, I will climb back onto the stick rotting beneath me, and balance till I can’t anymore.