It was September, just a few days into our senior year and a few weeks before lockdown would happen. We sat on our favorite bench, looked out at the sprawling city, and talked about all the things were going to do together that year: a road trip to Disneyland, the BTS concert, prom, graduation, and we would top it all off with a vacation in Hawaii. One last hurrah before I went away to college. I’m sitting on the same bench now, months later, wearing a surgical mask, all by myself—and I’m overwhelmed by a feeling of sadness for those girls. They were so full of plans. They had no idea that none of it would ever materialize.

Normally, I don’t hike this trail alone. There is safety in numbers, and I’m too afraid of being hunted down by a serial killer if I’m by myself. The thought of trying to run, uphill, to save my life, feels like a scene out of a grisly limited series in which my corpse ends up being used for some demented outdoor art installation, and then some jaded FBI agent will look at my mutilated body, shake his head, and say he’s seen a lot of shit, but nothing like this. So, yeah, that’s why I usually employ the buddy system. But today my desperate longing for a different view than the one from my balcony outweighed my fear of getting murdered. I am here because I need to be reminded that there’s more to life than crushing your interview with the Harvard admissions office. I need to believe this because I utterly bombed mine.

It’s all a blur, really. I was nervous and sweaty and stuttered my way through the whole conversation. How was I supposed to focus when I was trying my best to stave off a full-fledged panic attack the entire time? After it was over, I let out a scream and started sobbing uncontrollably. My parents and Neda heard me wail and burst into my room, terrified that I’d just found out someone else I loved had died or something. They’d all been biding their time in the kitchen, patiently waiting for a postmortem on my interview, and I’m pretty sure a nervous breakdown wasn’t what they expected.

“I screwed it up,” I managed to say between gasping for air. “Four years of working my ass off, and I screwed it all up in a thirty-minute interview.”

It wasn’t my first panic attack, but it was the first one my parents have ever witnessed. I clutched my chest and swore that my heart was going to stop and that I was about to die. My sister brought me water, but it was too hard to drink when I couldn’t even breathe. I screamed at my mom and dad to call an ambulance, and they stared at me, completely frozen.