Dystopia in summer

„These problems don‘t occur over night and it tells a lot about you that you did not fix it“, says the gray square that is my professor, and once again I realize that all my witching things have become an extra layer of skin because being alive hurts like hell and is unfair.

It has not stopped raining for two days. Very close to my current location whole houses were crashed by a flood and people have died or are still missing. And of course, the fourth wave of our plague is about to start.
The day feels weird. A sense of fear is lingering. I have trouble concentrating on the molecular structure that makes carrots orange.

Why do I have to concentrate on that? Before everything went crazy, I was going to be a teacher and chose something like basic science (the german equivalent of this subject has a very own definition and content and would be difficult to explain here) as my subject. What was more magical than explaining to little children why the sky was blue? I loved this job, but I got stuck finishing my degree within the pandemic, and so I spent the past year and a half working part time in a job that was hell under our every day restrictions and while trying to finish my studies from home.

And here I am now. Not having been understood by my professor for a minute because of reasons I cannot figure out spontaneously.
„Your sound was unbelievable“, he continues and he sparks this energy with his voice that connects the words he says with the flow of enjoying to humiliate me in front of 30 other people.
„I am sorry“, I say, trying to stop my voice from shaking, without success. „I had another exam 3 hours ago, and there everything was fine.“
Meanwhile the rain outside my window has become so heavy that I cannot see the opposite houses anymore.
„Yea, I don‘t know about that so I don‘t care“, he rambles on and I want to talk back, but I am not the kind of person that can simply talk back like that. At least not for myself. I talk back for other people. I really loved being a special education teacher to help and defend those that had a difficult start in life and do not fit our system.
But talking back to defend myself? Myself who right now has a fresh cut along her thigh, because a few nights ago I was convinced that friendship was over forever? Myself, who again did not sleep more than 4 hours the night before an exam?
I want to tell him that he has no right to judge me like this in front of all these people. I want to tell him that he is making assumptions about me out of one glitch that are not true at all.
But my heart is racing, my mouth is dry, and I just want to survive. My hands hold on to the huge ring on my finger, the cat ears on the part of my dress the webcam does not show, and I begin to feel safe under my red and today very curly hair. I can still smell the matches I used on my garden-flower scented candles, and my tomatoes are growing faithfully in my kitchen.

As I said, my witching things are a second layer of skin that I am so often lacking of and sometimes need to simply survive.

How did I survive before? I have not always needed all of these things. How would I have dealt with this situation before? Did everything happening around me always hit me as hard as it did at the moment?
I certainly would not always have started crying, as I did right there. I would have felt the same way, but would have closed my eyes, waited for the embarrassment to be over, and would have stormed out of there as soon as I could to tell my friends and relax over a cup of coffee while being reminded that he was constantly doing this to students and that it was a well-known secret how often this happened in his classes. After that, we would have probably spent the evening in a bar, and as I would have finally gotten home late that night, I would have had one last cup of tea while watching an episode of „Friends“ to relax and then go to sleep knowing that just another day with all the people I know and all the places I got used to was waiting for me and this thought would have been calming.
These things became my extra layer of skin. Maybe the fact that I need this extra protection around what is inside is the basic problem here, but it does not change the fact that I exist and have this need.

I needed a new motivation, and right now it is everything weird and odd that tells the story of surviving anyway.