A girl crosses an ocean for art school and finds a classroom she cannot hear, where everyone has turned into a potato speaking potato.
The most directly autobiographical piece here, and the one that shifts person mid-sentence — from “she” to “I” — at the exact moment the depression takes hold.
There is a girl who grow up in an island. She likes painting and English. Her dream is to go US and live there. In her future, she wants to be an artist in US.
After dreaming to go to US for 10 years, finally she got chance to go CA.
Her classes start in her college. She is excited to start her new classes and life. She wanted to make a lot of wonderful and CREATIVE things for the class. At first, she didn't understand a word of what the teacher was saying or what the students were saying. Still, she tried her best to keep up with the class.
It was an unusually cloudy day in CA and her mood was a little cloudy. As usual, the teacher had no idea what she was talking about, and her other classmates were laughing at her unintelligible story. The moment she said in her head that everyone seemed to be having fun, suddenly the sounds of people talking became distant and she could see a haze in front of her eyes. At this moment, the depression inside me began to take control of me.
From then on in class, I hear nothing and people around me start to look like potatoes. They speak in an unintelligible potato language for some reason and understand each other in that language.
Then her world became cloudy and depression took over. Her class teacher and friends notice this change in her and care about her. But it feels like an attack to her, a foot in the mud, and she rebuffs the help from others.
She decided to change her mood by playing with her friends, but her only friend suddenly confessed to her and told her he wanted her to be his girlfriend.
For her, it was like losing a friend she could count on. She was shocked that her friend, whom she had begun to trust as a friend, saw her in a different light, and she became afraid to trust anyone.
She has no place in the outside world and retreats into her shell.
The only time she finds solace in these days is when she sits in her garden every night and gazes up at the stars.
Every night she looks at the stars and cries for her hometown. One night, realizing that these stars pass through the sky of her hometown every day, she talks to the stars.
She wonders to the stars how her family is doing and if they are happy.
The next night the stars told her that her family is always thinking of her.
Then she stopped crying and resumed painting her favorite pictures. The bright colors she uses are like coloring her cloudy world, and she gets back into the swing of things.
Her world still has potatoes speaking in a language she can't make sense of, but for her that world has turned colorful instead of cloudy. She knows that she can change the world with her power, and she lives her life without being ruled by depression, even when sad and lonely things happen.