Zombie Mode

I was running on three hours of sleep and pure anxiety—basically a zombie with a Starbucks addiction. The APUSH exam had turned my brain into mush, but somehow I was still expected to function like a normal human being.

"You look dead," Maya said, sliding into the seat across from me at lunch. "Like, actually deceased."

"Thanks, bestie. Really boosting my confidence there."

She wasn't wrong. I'd spent half the night staring at my ceiling, overthinking THAT conversation with Jordan—the one where I'd said something weird and then spent forty-eight hours analyzing it. Classic me.

The drama started when my little brother's goldfish, Finny, decided to graduate to the great fishbowl in the sky. Naturally, this became MY problem because my parents were "busy" and my brother was "too devastated." Spoiler: he was fine. I was the one stuck with a dead goldfish and zero idea what to do.

"Can't you just flush it?" Maya asked, like I was being ridiculous.

"It's not about the FLUSHING, Maya. It's about the EMOTIONAL LABOR."

Anyway, I'm standing there with this tiny fish corpse when our cat, Luna, decides NOW is the perfect time to launch herself at my face. Because she's a chaotic evil demon in fur form. I dodged, but the goldfish bowl went flying, and suddenly I'm cleaning up water and dead fish while my cat watches like she's proud of herself.

The weirdest part? I started crying. Not even about the fish. Just—everything. The exams, the Jordan situation, the fact that I hadn't slept properly in days. My brother found me sobbing over a paper towel.

"You okay?" he asked, genuinely concerned.

"No," I said. "But I will be."

Later that night, I ended up running. Just—running. No destination, no phone, no music. Until my lungs burned and my legs felt like jelly. And for the first time in days, my brain actually shut up. No overthinking. No anxiety. Just pavement and breath and the fact that I was still moving.

Maybe that's the thing about growing up. Sometimes you feel like a zombie. Sometimes you cry over dead goldfish. Sometimes your cat ruins everything. But you keep running anyway.