College, the Quiet Years

Leaving home was easier than I expected. After graduation, the house felt even smaller. The rituals didn’t stop just because I had a diploma. Candles still burned in the basement. The old books still lined my father’s shelves. My mother still muttered prayers over the doorframes.

I packed my life into two suitcases and one battered cardboard box. T‑shirts, jeans, a few hoodies. A stack of sketchbooks I never showed anyone. The diploma they’d mailed after the ceremony.

The sunglasses went in last.

I held them in my hand for a moment, feeling their weight. They’d saved me, in their way. Turned the world from a scream into something I could live in. But lately, the noise had been quieter, even without them.

Still, I wrapped them in a T‑shirt and tucked them into the bottom of the box.

Not on my face. Not in the trash.

Just… there.

“Call us when you get there,” my mother said at the curb, hands folded too tightly.

My father carried the heavier suitcase down the steps without comment. When he set it in the trunk, he finally looked at me.

“You’ll do well,” he said. It sounded like a prophecy and a hope and an apology all at once.

My older brother showed up late, as usual. He pulled me into a quick hug in the driveway, keys jingling in his hand.

“Text me if you need anything,” he said. “And if they start doing weird basement stuff in your dorm, transfer.”

I laughed, but there was a tremor in it. He squeezed my shoulder once, then stepped back.

As I drove away, the house shrank in the rearview mirror, the basement buried somewhere under its foundation. The further I got, the lighter my chest felt. By the time the highway swallowed the neighborhood behind me, I could breathe without thinking about the dryer, the chalk marks, the candles.

College sat in another city entirely. Different streets. Different air. No history clinging to the walls.

I told myself: maybe, for once, I get to just be.

The drawer

My dorm room was small—two narrow beds, two desks, a window that looked out over a courtyard full of kids dragging suitcases and cardboard boxes just like mine. My roommate hadn’t arrived yet. His side of the room was a blank slate.

I set my box on my bed and started unpacking. Clothes into drawers. Sketchbooks on the shelf. Pencil case on the desk.

The sunglasses stayed in the box until the very end.

When I finally unwrapped them, the room was quiet. Outside, somebody shouted over a dropped box and a car horn answered, but inside it was just me and the faint hum of the overhead light.

Up close, the lenses still held tiny scratches from years of use. The frame was familiar in my hands, molded to the shape of my face.

I waited for the old fear to rise—If you don’t wear these, you’ll drown—but it didn’t come. I just felt… wary.

I opened the top drawer of my dresser, moved a folded stack of shirts aside, and set the sunglasses at the back, wrapping them again in cotton before I closed the drawer.

Sleeping pills in a nightstand. Bandages in a medicine cabinet. Sunglasses in a drawer.

Just in case.

The first week, I kept expecting the hallway to hit me the way high school did. I braced for the flood every time I stepped into a crowd. But it never came.

In the dorm, I heard normal things: arguments over whose turn it was to take out the trash, music leaking through the wall, someone laughing at a video at two in the morning. When I passed people in the hall or the cafeteria, sometimes I felt a flicker—stress before an exam, a crush someone wasn’t ready to admit—but it was soft, distant. Background noise, not a blaring speaker.

The power hadn’t vanished. It had retreated.

I stopped walking like every step might set off a landmine. I stopped scanning faces for emotional impact. After a while, the habit of bracing faded, replaced by something I hadn’t felt in years:

normal.

Graphic design

I didn’t choose my major because of some grand dream.

I just knew I wanted something that combined structure and creativity—lines and color and meaning, without candles or chalk circles. Something that turned ideas into images people could actually use.

Graphic design sounded like that.

My intro courses were filled with kids who already wore black and carried fancy sketchbooks, and others who had only ever drawn in the margins of their notebooks. I landed somewhere in the middle. I knew how to make things look clean, balanced. I just didn’t know yet what I wanted to say.

Days fell into rhythm.

Typography in the morning, history of design in the afternoon. Assignments that made me stare at grids and color wheels until my eyes blurred. Late nights in the computer lab, screens glowing in a row while we all pretended the deadline wasn’t as close as it was.

I liked it.

I liked that there were rules—hierarchy, contrast, spacing—and that if you followed them well enough, people would feel something when they saw your work without knowing why. It was like directing attention without being seen.

For once, I was the one deciding what to show and what to hide.

The sunglasses stayed in the drawer.

Sometimes, when a headache threatened or when a classroom felt too crowded, I’d think about pulling them out and slipping them on with a muttered “migraine.” But the world never quite reached that old unbearable volume, so I let the drawer stay closed.

Weeks passed. Then months.

I started to believe that whatever my parents had stirred up in that basement had loosened its grip once I left the house behind.

Meeting Lauren

I met Lauren in a class I almost dropped.

It was a required studio course—Visual Communication II, the kind with group critiques where your work got pinned to a wall and dissected in front of everyone. I hated that part. Not because of the criticism, but because standing in front of a group while they stared at something you’d made felt too much like high school again: all eyes, all at once.

She sat two seats over from me on the first day, sketchbook open, pen moving in quick, confident strokes while the professor went over the syllabus. She had dark hair pulled back in a messy knot, a nose ring, and the kind of attention that didn’t wander.

When the professor paired us for a partner exercise—“someone you don’t already know”—she turned to me before I could look away.

“I’m Lauren,” she said. “Do you hate this icebreaker as much as I do?”

“Almost,” I said. “I think I hate my own handwriting more.”

She glanced at my sketchbook and smirked. “Your handwriting’s fine. Your kerning could use therapy, but the strokes are nice.”

It shouldn’t have made me laugh, but it did. Something settled in my chest. Not a flood. Not pressure. Just a small, clean line of amusement.

We spent the exercise designing fake posters for an event that didn’t exist. Ours was for an imaginary midnight film festival: bold type, stark contrast, a tiny illustration of an empty theater seat. We argued about whether the main title should be all caps or not. I lost, and she was right.

After class, she walked with me down the hallway.

“You’re good,” she said, nodding back toward the studio. “You think too much, but that’s not always a bad thing.”

“You barely know me,” I said.

“I watched you erase the same line three times,” she replied. “That’s enough data for now.”

I didn’t feel anything from her I didn’t want to feel.

That was the strangest part.

With most people, there was always a second layer—the worry under the joke, the resentment under the compliment. With Lauren, what I sensed matched what she said. If she found something funny, she laughed. If she was annoyed, it showed. She didn’t leak unspoken storms every time she opened her mouth.

Being around her felt like standing in a quiet room with the window open. Air moved. Light shifted. But nothing crashed into me.

We ended up in the same group for the next project, and then the next. We started lingering after critiques, walking to the cafeteria together, trading playlists while we worked in the lab.

We talked. A lot.

About nothing—bad fonts on restaurant menus, the tragedy of stock photos, the one professor who still thought bevel and emboss was a good idea. And about everything—her family, my vague descriptions of “a complicated home,” the way both of us wanted to design something that mattered, even if we weren’t sure what that meant yet.

She never asked why I sometimes got quiet in crowds. I never told her about the basement, or the laundry, or the day I thought my mind wasn’t mine anymore.

But sitting across from her in the cafeteria at midnight, sharing greasy fries and bad coffee, I realized something I hadn’t expected:

I hadn’t thought about the sunglasses in weeks.

The quiet

One night, in my dorm room, I opened the dresser drawer just to prove to myself they were still there.

They were, wrapped in the same T‑shirt. I unrolled the fabric and held the frame in my hand. The lenses caught the dim lamplight, throwing back a muted reflection of my face—older than high school, but still recognizably me.

My head didn’t hurt. The hallway outside was quiet. No one’s thoughts were crowding in at the edges.

The world felt still.

I thought about putting them on, just to see if anything changed. Just to test whether the world would blur a little more, whether the faint remnants of other people’s storms would dull even further.

Instead, I wrapped them back up and set them in the corner of the drawer.

I didn’t need them.

Not here. Not now.

For the first time since I stood on that graduation stage, I allowed myself to believe that maybe the worst was behind me. That maybe, away from my parents’ house and their rituals and the basement, whatever lived inside me had quieted enough to let me live.

The next day in class, Lauren bumped my shoulder with her sketchbook as we argued about color palettes. She laughed, bright and uncomplicated, and the only thing I felt from her was exactly what her face showed.

Peace.

If there was one person I could ever imagine telling the whole truth to, it was the girl who made the world feel like that.

But I wasn’t ready. Not yet.

For now, it was enough to sit beside her in a studio filled with paper and ink and possibility, the sunglasses sleeping in my drawer like a past life I had put on pause.