i never bought the whole dark academia thing.
sure, ****** and drugs and *** are torrid and dark when you're from a rich family,
when you've never woken up to the news of your childhood best friend being shot to death,
when you haven't seen your family and friends fall into the seductive cesspool of opioid addiction,
when half of your class was pregnant by the time senior year rolled around.
the academic upper class thinks what working class kids go through is sexier when the backdrop of the overdose is chandeliers and silk,
instead of a small town parking lot at 3am.
my aesthetic reality of academia is scholarships, it's leather jackets and nicotine addictions
it's having the only fifteen-year-old car in the campus parking lot and hoping to find a plug before the first week of classes.
it's not sleeping between work and class and partying. it's being the only one whose dad isn't buddies with the guy giving me an internship.
it's lonely. it's the crippling loneliness of not understanding upper class social cues,
it's reading crime and punishment in the slivers of time between work and work and class and more work
and emphasizing with raskalnikov so much it makes your teeth ache.
it's coughing up blood.
it's having health insurance for the first time in college and still not using it.
it's drowning, it's fighting, it's violent and heroic and painful and
never knowing
if you'll actually
make it.
