MY GRANDPARENTS ARE COMING to dinner—all four of them. This morning, Mum had one of her "therapy" sessions with that new-age yogi weirdo and came home all touchy-feely, talking about family being our strength. So she called up all the grandparents and invited them for a family dinner. Being old people, of course they had nothing going on. They're all eagerly tearing down the Don Valley Parkway as we speak. Except for Grandpa Ed, who prefers to bike everywhere, even in winter, because he finds modern cars too technical.

I know why she's doing this. My mother can't stand not knowing things. She seems to think that, just because she birthed me, she has the absolute right to know everything I think, feel or do. Like we're still connected by some phantom umbilical cord. I thought moving out would sever it, but apparently, the cord streeeeeetched all the way to Kingston. Now that I'm back, it's all loose and floppy and feels like it's winding around my neck. She's determined to squeeze out every little secret even though I've told her as much as she needs to know. She figures the grandparents (universally known to be totally without boundaries) will help her dig out the dirt.

I'm considering just not being here when they show up, but I can't make up my mind where I'd go. I'm not sure I have the energy to get properly dressed anyway. I've been wearing the same clothes since I left school. Sleeping in them even. I definitely need a shower. There are flakes of black nail polish scattered across the bedsheets. It seems I've fallen into a deep, quicksandy pit of melancholy that isn't helped by obsessively stalking Jules' Insta but at the same time makes it so that's the only thing I seem to have the energy to do.

Ugh.

Jules and her stupid, perfect face. Her perfect clothes and always-a-good-hair-day hair. Her stupid bed that she never makes even though she knows I like things tidy. Her stupid make-up everywhere, and her little, lacy bralettes strewn all over every surface. Don't even get me started on her stupid boyfriend, who could not be less deserving of someone as perfect as Jules.

It occurs to me that they're probably having sex on my bed right now, happy as anything that I decided to leave and (maybe) never come back.

Ugh, again.

I cannot tell my family any of this. They would jump to the conclusion that this is about something it isn't. An unrequited crush or a friendship soured. And while maybe it is a little of both, it's also neither.

I try to imagine explaining to them that somewhere between the day they dropped me off at campus and the day I decided to get the hell out of there without telling anyone, I lost myself. I lost my direction. I couldn't remember why I ever wanted to be there in the first place, pursuing an economics degree so I could — what — be an egomaniacal corporate CEO one day? Count my money while the world burns? Not give a shit that the generation after me will have to think twice about even having kids because nobody wants to be John Cusack in that end of the world disaster movie, trying to keep children alive while everything falls apart.

Just the thought of that is sucking me even deeper into my depression-hole.

It wasn't all bad at first, of course. At the beginning, I was excited just to be there. Away from my family and our tiny house. To be a part of this big, beautiful, historic academic community. I've never been good at making friends, so I tended to avoid the big residence parties that went on for the first full week. While everyone else partied, I went for walks down to the lake and dreamt about my new life. Maeve MacKenzie, university student. Then, later, Maeve MacKenzie, brilliant, innovative businesswoman. Then, eventually, Maeve MacKenzie: successful, rich, glamorously dressed, powerful... lonely, unsociable, purposeless.

For the first time, I realized I didn't entirely like the sound of that. I found myself conflicted. Can a person be a success in business but still live with purpose? I thought of my mother and her struggle to escape corporate life. She walked away because she's an idealist. She opened her own business and used it to house and employ street kids, giving them a future they wouldn't have had otherwise — applause from the bleeding hearts — but realistically, the cafe is always in the red. You can't make real money AND do good in the world. That's just not how society is set up.

The more I thought about it, the less clear my direction felt. My dreams started to feel thin and pointless. Foundations started to erode. Little by little, class by class, I found myself losing interest and focus. How could I care about supply and demand, monetary policy, or inflation when good people can't even make a living doing good?

I began to see the cracks in everything. And once you see them, you start obsessing. Like, why can't everyone see them? They're right there! They're getting bigger all the time! Why aren't we all freaking out?

I started obsessively reading philosophy books when I should have been studying International Trade Policy. Jules, my roommate, went out to the student pub almost every night, so I had plenty of time to sit by myself in our two bed, two desk, cinder block room and consider the notion of purpose. Kierkegaard spoke to me especially with his thoughts on the self and its ability (or not) to relate to the world around it. I started to see — to feel — that we are all unconnected, isolated selves experiencing the same reality but perceiving it completely differently.

One night, Jules stumbled back into our room at two in the morning and found me in a panic-ball on the carpet between our beds.

"Whoa! What are you doing down there? I thought you'd be asleep by now." She flung her bag onto my bed and knelt on the floor beside me. She smelled like Body Shop Vanilla which is a smell I love so much that I literally lifted my head from between my knees and took a big, creepy inhale of the air between us.

"You smell like vanilla," I sputtered. "Undistilled Guatemalan vanilla specifically. I used to import...."

"Maeve," she interrupted me with a gentle hand on my shoulder, "No judgement because I'm pretty lit myself, but... are you high? Have you taken something? You look strange. Not like yourself."

I gasped. Kierkegaard! What does my 'self' really look like? And does it look different to me than to her?

I forced myself to sit up, cross-legged on the floor in front of her and make full, extended eye contact with her. Urgently, I asked her, "Jules, what colour is my hair?"

She made a "you crazy bitch" face but humoured me. "Dark brown."

"No, describe it. Not just brown. I need more to compare our views." My fists were balled up in my lap, and I felt like everything I'd ever known was hanging on the accuracy of her next reply.

She moved a little closer to me, both of us sitting criss-cross-applesauce, knees touching, and really looked. She even reached over and lifted a lock of my hair from where I kept it tucked behind my ear. Her fingers turned it over, felt the strands.

"Okay, your hair is a deep, chestnut brown — like the chestnuts you find beside the Seine in Paris in late fall. You can pick them up and polish them with your thumb until they shine, and this sort of redness in the brown comes through."

I blinked at her. I would never have put it so poetically, but based on what she said, I felt that our selves shared a perceived reality. She kept hold of the piece of hair she was holding and moved her face closer. She breathed so close to my ear I imagined I could hear the capillaries in her lungs oxygenate.

"Your chestnut hair is beautiful."

She hadn't leaned back yet, so her words came in a gust of vodka-cooler scented breath against my cheek.

"How about me?" she said, backing away just enough that I could see her face again. "What colour is my hair?"

I studied her hard. I wanted to get this right and prove that we were sharing a reality.

"Your hair," I ran my fingers across my lips nervously. "Your hair is pink. Like soft, tissue paper roses."

She nodded. I explained to her about Kierkegaard and how I was questioning everything. What was real, what wasn't. How things could be real one minute, then not real the next. We sat like that, looking at each other, comparing our realities as my bedside clock ticked us on toward the morning.

Somewhere near dawn, she pressed her lips against mine.

Even while she was doing it, my mind raced forward. How would I describe the feeling of her kissing me so that we could compare? Like soft, tissue paper roses was my first thought. But wait, that's how I perceived her hair. Surely her hair and her lips couldn't be the same. I found myself starting to ebb back into a panic, trying to tell the two apart, when she stopped.

"God, Maeve, you're a strange one. Sweet dreams."

And then she hopped up off the floor, lay down on her bed and pulled her duvet up over her face, signalling that our shared reality was over.

You can see why I don't want to tell my family any of this. It's too personal. Too delicate to stand up to their eager scrutiny.

After that, things got awkward between Jules and I. I tried to behave normally, but being a socially-awkward introvert didn't help. I thought it was best to keep to my routines. Jules invited me out with her the next night, and the night after and for a few more nights after that, but I always declined. I didn't want to be out with her, wondering if she was thinking about my hair or just thinking about how strange I was. I thought about her all the time but didn't want to tell her that in case it made me sound even more peculiar. When she was in our room, I wished she'd leave. When she was out, I'd have a hollow feeling in my stomach. It was like I couldn't be around her but needed to be around her at the same time.

I was working to chart this territory between Jules and myself — to figure out how I felt about it all — when she started seeing Eric. I guess she'd had enough trying to convince me to go out with her and found someone else to share reality with. Someone who, by the looks of him, would know exactly what to do when she kissed him.

Ugh.

I stuff my phone under my pillow only to take it back out one minute later.