“I’m too fucked to drown myself in my work.”

An annihilated Dylan sits in the light of the Ruakura McDonalds. The fluorescence pokes at my eyelids like a witch’s finger, wreaking all sorts of fucking havoc on my brain. What I remember – not a lot, and not anything I want to – is a collage of poor and LED-lit late-night decisions which led me first into Town, drinking until it hurt, then to the computer rooms of the University library, and then for an early morning hike to what Google told me was the nearest McDonalds. I gotta go back to Uni today, and I make the long walk in my fucked jeans and the same shirt I spilled a too-expensive drink on the night before. The party’s been over for eight hours, but I can still feel Shake It by Taylor Swift in my ears.

Campus is quiet and still; I am cool and opiated. I like to stand on the edge of the parking lot and meditate on the sound of it all; of the birds, and the rolling of tyres, and on the feeling of a cold blue Hamilton morning that takes me back to Hinau street, four years old. A dart would do me good. I have a spare shirt in my car, which I throw on, and then I face the day.

I mess with my hair all the way up the stairs, all the while dodging Dominos vouchers and people asking for directions. At the same time, braced against the staircase’s huge concrete flanks, I wonder if any of these people know who I am. I feel like a douchebag when I wonder this, and then I feel like less of a douchebag as I find myself in a heap, sitting across from my friend S, who is like if Neil Quigley was born in 2006.

“You got many lectures?” He asks.

“English today.” I grumble. He can tell that thinking about the actual university part of university is being rejected by last night’s mental recoil. So, he switches topics to girls, like that’ll make me feel any better. Like it’ll make me think any less.

“How’s Courtney?” S asks me. I think to myself; the girl I’d been talking to on Tinder for short of a week. . . How is she?

“Courtney…” I trail off.

“Tinder Courtney. Twenty-year-old Courtney. Your mature lover.”

“Yea, fine. She wanted to know about my job.” I scratch incessantly at my collar and pat myself down. A cigarette would do me good. “My very serious, very high paying job.”

“You ask her about Insta or snap or anything else?”

“She’s not too big on the whole me being eighteen thing. I think.” I answer his question without really answering it.

“How do you know? When did she last get back to you?”

“About two, yesterday.” I realise this is probably why the night is a blur of sound and vision.

S’s lips part to show a toothy grimace, letting out a fake and prolonged hissing noise, his face is stretched out and looking the way it always looks when something about me and a girl isn’t going well, which is often. Not that this is gonna become a Diary of a Virgin column or anything, but I can only avoid touching on my emotional misadventures for so long.

“So what are you gonna do, then? Keep using Tinder and shit? Or just… IDK, look for love on campus?”

“I’m just gonna drown myself in my work, I think.” I watch a guy walk past wearing a shirt with an off-centre PNG of a Joy Division shirt on it.

We sit there for a little while longer, not really saying anything worth much, thankfully talk is cheap, because last night burnt me down to eight bucks. I slip downstairs with the water feature.

I’m too fucked to drown myself in my work. There’s a part of the ocean where two currents meet, and they’re both ocean, but they don’t mesh. That’s kind of like trying to drown out the static of a hangover with a moodle quiz’s wall of blue light. You can’t. I’m, all of a sudden, behind a table at clubs day. Handing out copies of Zero and One and slamming back lukewarm Oreo coke. It’s not good. It’s really not. You can pretend that it’s vanilla coke, but when you’re clutching your gut and holding back vomit on the drive back to Cambridge, you’ll know that pretending is a cope. I’m organizing a strike to stop having Oreo cokes forced upon freshers.

Recorded lectures turn into a wall of buzzwords and deadlines, and I worry about a dozen things that don’t matter while course outlines and answers are placed right in front of me. I got an 100/100 on an icebreaker though, so that’s gotta count for something. That big, bright 100 scrapes the static from my mind like tuning to the right channel and suddenly I feel like an academic weapon. Steady clarity. I just need my life to be a constant pop-up loop of graded icebreakers and I’ll be set. That’s why I love dating apps, they’re just icebreakers; over and over again.