Watch Jessica Monk

There’s no way that it’s morning already. I hear footsteps running down the hall; eight hours ago this would have been considered typical, but now, it’s completely ludicrous. The door to my dorm room swings open with a nauseating kind of reality, shattering any possibilities that I might have been dreaming. It was her again, I knew it. What did she want now?

She pulled me out of my dreamland and into hers with an awkward transition, leaving me no room for reaction. She tugged me into the hall and dragged me toward the exit. “What is the problem?” I said to her irritably. At this hour, I was not concerned with tact. She continued to pull me outside as if it offered some sort of compromise, as if nature could possibly satisfy my current sleep deficiency. Then just as I was beginning to diagnose a lunatic, she pointed to the horizon and uttered a single word, “Watch.”

I squinted into the distance between a collection of trees and searched for some hidden wonder. In finding none, my gaze drifted back to her face, her delicate features softened in the morning air. She was seeing something I wasn’t, and I couldn’t believe I was missing it.

Suddenly, tension lifted on wings of heaven, and birds sang her song. Life began to blossom...