I don't even know why I'm typing this because it's like 2:14 in the morning and my phone screen is so bright it's making my eyes water and I'm sitting on the floor of my bedroom and my mom is asleep in the next room because she has to get up at 5:00 for her shift at the diner and I just finished the biggest thing of my life and I feel like I'm disappearing. I did my big defense today, that's what they call it when you have to talk to all the old professors in their suits and they ask you questions that are supposed to trip you up but I knew all the answers because I've been doing nothing but reading since I was like twelve years old and they said I passed and they called me "Doctor" which is so weird because I'm only seventeen and I still have to ask my mom if I can use the car to go get a soda but I have this piece of paper now that says I'm the smartest person in the county or something but I just feel like a big fat nothing and I don't know why and it makes me feel like such a bad person because everyone worked so hard to get me here. I started packing up my books tonight because I have to move out of this house soon and I have 427 books exactly because I counted them twice while I was putting them in these old liquor store boxes my uncle Dave brought over in his truck and I was looking at this one book, it's green and the corner is all chewed up because my dog Sparky got to it when he was a puppy back in 2021 before he died, and I realized I spent six whole months writing just three pages about that one book and now I look at it and it just looks like a pile of trash. I just threw it in the box really hard and it made this loud THUD that echoed in the hallway and I stopped breathing for a second to see if my mom woke up but she just coughed and stayed asleep and I just sat there on the rug staring at the dust bunnies and I realized I don't care about any of it anymore, not the history or the research or the way the words sound when they're all put together right and it's like I've been holding my breath for five years and now that I can finally breathe I found out there's no air left in the room. Everyone in this town thinks I'm some kind of miracle or something because I finished high school so fast and then did the college stuff online and through the mail and Mr. Henderson at the school told everyone I was the "ticket out" for our whole family and he even did a little speech at the church about me last Sunday which was so embarrassing I wanted to crawl under the pews and hide. And then today during the defense the internet kept cutting out because we had that big storm at 3:30pm and the rain was hitting the tin roof so loud I could barely hear the professors and I had to keep repeating myself like a broken record and when they finally said "Congratulations Dr. Miller" I just said "okay" and shut my laptop and went to the kitchen to see if there was any bologna left for a sandwich but there wasn't and I just stood there looking at the empty fridge and I didn't feel happy or proud or anything at all, I just felt heavy like I was made of lead or like I was a ghost watching someone else live my life. The thing is I used to love this stuff so much and I would stay up until my eyes burned with a flashlight under the covers because I wanted to know everything about how the coal mines worked and the people who lived here before us but now it feels like I traded my whole life for a bunch of facts that don't matter to anyone. I haven't gone swimming at the creek since I was thirteen and I haven't talked to any of the kids I used to know because they all think I'm stuck up or just weird and they're probably right because I don't know how to talk about anything except my research and nobody here wants to hear about that anyway. I have 1,214 index cards in these little plastic bins and they're all color coded with the markers I bought at the Dollar General with my birthday money and I looked at the blue ones tonight and I can't even remember why I wrote them or what they mean and it's like I'm looking at a different language that I used to speak but I forgot it overnight. My uncle Dave even sold his old truck, the one with the flames on the side that he loved so much, just so he could help pay for some of my fees and my books and if he knew that I wanted to just take all these boxes out to the back field and set them on fire he would be so hurt and I can't bear the thought of that but I can't stop thinking about the fire.