Corey sat in the library, the sunlight creeping towards her across the table, completely stumped. Vaguely irritated, she looked out the huge windows before her and surveyed the light layer of snow over the still green grass. She saw evergreens, dead-looking shrubs and a highway. There was an ugly office building across the highway and a traffic light blowing in the wind. A few of the leaves left of the shrubs rustled in the wind she couldn’t hear or feel and cars motored past on the highway she could only observe.

She paused to blow her nose and immediately felt unfortunately conspicuous. The Asian girl at the next table over sat in her zipped-up jacket with her backpack on, pouring over three small books she had appeared with about half an hour previously. Corey wondered what they were. A white-haired, balding man paced by, perusing the tax information provided by the library as the sun started to inch up Corey’s arms. This bothered her almost more than her inability to complete an essay. She was very sensitive to temperature and had been perfectly comfortable before the sun started to heat her up. She had already moved once and figured this was her comeuppance for sitting by the huge windows.

Somewhere behind her, a tutorial was going on. It had been since she arrived and she couldn’t figure out for the life of her what it was for. Physics, maybe. Or some standardized test involving physics. They were wrapping it up now, exchanging schedules and promising to call each other. A white minivan drove by.

Corey had come to the library to avoid her dog. This sounded rather infantile but the dog was having one of those days where she was all over the place and unhappy in all of them. This was particularly grating to someone attempting to write an essay that would hopefully secure her a place at the Cooper-Hewitt Museum in New York City for ten weeks in the upcoming summer. But apparently it wasn’t the dog. After some serious ponderance, Corey had come to the conclusion that it was not the dog, it was not her but it was, in fact, the question. This question that she had answered a hundred times over in applying to various things. “Describe your career goals and specific areas of interest.” Tell us your story, the essay question asked politely with a fake smile and a quirk of its head intended to show interest. Corey didn’t believe any of it and labored over making the essay interesting. She doubted that she would ever been happy with whatever she wrote and longed for mediocrity so she could just have it done and perhaps fine-tune it later.

The sunlight had now almost reached her neck. It reminded her of drowning. As the sunlight went up her body, she thought that her deadline would be when it went over her head. She liked setting these random deadlines for herself. It made her complete things. Yet still she sat, ineffectually writing something that wasn’t her essay. Enlightenment did not come to her and she had no idea what to actually write. Of course she had career goals and specific interests and of course she could tell the people at the Cooper-Hewitt all about them, but now her brain seemed intent upon making the essay interesting and different. She wanted to write it like a work of fiction, like a story. History is a story, she thought to herself, hoping she had finally stumbled onto the cohesive theme for her essay. History is a story and here is mine.

That’s where she choked. History is a story and here is mine inevitably led to her story. The story she had told a million times and was sick of so doing. She was sorely tempted to just recycle one of the other essays but this didn’t appeal to her sense of improvement over the years. She sincerely hoped that her writing has somehow improved over the past years and that using an essay from a year ago would show less-than-stellar writing. Not that her current writing was stellar. She didn’t flatter herself with that. She only hoped to consider it “better.”

Looking over one of the old essays, she didn’t think she would write it much differently now. It was written in basically the same style she always wrote in. She could just use it. Edit the last two paragraphs where she mentioned “Oxford” and make them read something equally inspirational about the Cooper-Hewitt. She could.

The sun was starting to reach her eyes now. This had to stop. She couldn’t work with sun in her eyes. That was intolerable. She sighed and looked out the window again. There were no cars on the highway and the light was green. The wind seemed to have picked up but she couldn’t really tell. She longed to just write the damn essay but it would not come for all her free-writes and thinking. She imagined the shrubs making a rustling noise as they silently swayed beyond the window. She felt sorry for the fichus plant near her table. It probably wanted to be outside with the other plants but remained perpetually indoors. Thoughts like that sort of annoyed her. She shouldn’t be thinking about fichus plants, she should be thinking about her career goals and specific interests!

She had to baby-sit in about an hour and a half. She was vaguely hungry. She wanted desperately to write this essay. But she couldn’t.