I haven’t been to the campus in weeks, and assistants have taken over my class. The department head keeps calling and I keep giving him excuses. Last week I said it was my brother, that he was in trouble—unspecified. A stupid lie, easily discovered by looking into my file and finding out I don’t have a brother. I am an only child. Parents both dead–car-crash—when I was five. Raised by my British mother’s sister in a South-side townhouse that she liked to pretend was an English manor. The plot for a novel. A bad one. But when I told the lie I was stressed. The conversations had begun two weeks before, and I said the first thing that came to my mind.

There is a large concern that I am going insane. Schizophrenic. Manic. O.C.-fucking-D. So I told the stupid lie and then told another and another and here I am, afraid to leave my apartment on Cope Street. Windows shut despite the heat and afraid to turn on the air conditioner because that makes it worse. Why would cold air make the conversations louder? And what are the conversations anyhow? Who the sweet fuck is in my head?