Today, she woke up. Sometimes she had bad days, sometimes she had good days, but on this rare occasion, it felt like a mind-blowingly great day. Her morning routine had been played thousands of times before, but like an understudy proving herself in someone else’s limelight, she felt that today was the performance that mattered. How much had she drank the night before? Though her mind was unusually clear for a Saturday morning, her throat was sore. It surprised her to see the near empty ashtray which normally overflowed the morning after an evening in. She swallowed, trying to carefully excavate the residue of phlegm without aggravating the tender tissue. What a night it must have been!  She sprang from the lifeless mattress and paced the small dormitory room, overwhelmed by her uncharacteristic energy. A professional employer of the snooze button, she laughed thinking how the day before not even lethal levels of caffeine could shake the soporific state that carried her through the days. This morning however, she could not have fallen asleep if she tried. Everything was brightly crisp, far too vivid to admit her to that self sensory realm. At the desk, her laptop was still on, the screen saver, a black screen with silver words which read “get back to work!”  The workspace was littered with tiny extensions of her personality, her MP3 player, purse, diary and mobile. Three unread messages were on her phone, but she didn’t feel like talking to anyone just yet. She wanted to enjoy this peculiar and enlightening feeling. Her fingers flipped to the day’s date in the messy diary, filled with scrawls and comments from her friends. Tearing out the schedule and screwing it up, she discarded it with glee to the floor. There would be no plans made today, no prescribed limitations, she would organise some respite from routine.  The air felt suddenly dank and suffocating and she wanted to escape the dorm to see if her good day would extend to the rest of her world. She pushed her hair out of her eyes, but it persisted in falling down over her right eye. Digging around under her bed she found a discarded headband. Taking her beauty tools, she titivated quickly, secured her darkened locks from her sight and felt ready for outside.