I wrote this short story this morning as a writing warm-up for working on my Personal Statement for my grad school application. It is unedited and not meant to be anything fancy.
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Lydia woke up in the wee hours of the morning after barely two hours of consecutive sleep to her alarm vibrating her bed. She’s been leaving her phone on her bed as her left ear is clogged up, and it’s hard to hear the alarms in the morning. It takes her until 4:55am to finally roll out of bed, throw on sweats, and collect her laptop and headset to go teach downstairs. On average, Lydia teaches five days out of the week to young children in China. She teaches them English, and it’s rewarding if only for the fact that her TESOL certification is the only part of her four years of college that she actually uses these days.
The teaching goes about as well as expected with one kid screaming the whole time to the point she turned his volume to 5 and everyone else’s to 90, and then turns down the master volume so his one voice doesn’t blow out her ears. Then the lesson ends and she collects her things to go upstairs. She throws all her stuff back into their respective spots, then collapses back in bed. Yesterday she traded shifts at the coffee shop to help someone else out, so instead of preparing to smell like old coffee and feel like old syrup, she gets a few extra hours of sleep.
As she lays in bed, dreaming of the few hours of shut-eye she’ll get before having to be productive in the aftermath of Christmas presents and the severe lack of emotions she has for this time of year, she contemplates the cousin who committed suicide a week ago and the fact the only four people she’s interacted with in the new year is four Chinese Children.
- Lydia Copeland
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