disappear near me

by Daniel Bailey

Photo by Emma Louise Rodgers

I tried to do my literary homework last night but realized I was still sane, which felt like cheating. My professor treated me like I’d just eaten glue in front of the class and called me illiterate. Maybe he’s right. Debt isn’t inherited like a last name; it’s absorbed through fluorescent lights and coffee breath. Passed down by professors who take your brain out, dance on it, and still die broke.

Forget Tulane. The campus looks like a postcard of a wealthy uncle’s funeral. Red brick mausoleums covered in ivy, marble stairs that lead nowhere but down, and a football team that should be a hedge fund. The whole place is a debt factory wrapped in Gothic windows.

I can’t wait to drop out. I’m failing on purpose. Falling with style, like Buzz Lightyear but with student loans.

Next week I’ll skip class and write for cash. Columns, essays, ransom notes, obituaries for people who still owe Sallie Mae. Anything that pays for dinner. I’m broke enough to consider a life of crime, but self-aware enough to know I’d make a terrible criminal. I’m too paranoid to enjoy success and too tired to get caught.

During one of those hangover breaks between classes I barely remember attending, I met this guy who said he wrote for the school paper and got paid. I was inspired. Then I tried it. They took two of my pieces and paid me in “feedback.” I should’ve asked for food stamps.

So I started sending my work everywhere. Six months of bloodshot eyes and caffeine seizures. Typing like a rat trapped inside a typewriter. Now I’m here. Still typing.

Writing makes me laugh. It’s either that or find a real job.

They say college is where you “find yourself.” I found myself staring at a bathroom mirror at 4:47 a.m., eyes red like brake lights, whispering to a version of me that only appears when I haven’t slept in days. I watched intrusive thoughts come and go like buses that never stop for me.

It’s funny, being alive. Like a long joke nobody explains.

One morning—or maybe another, they all melt together like cafeteria cheese—I argued with a plump philosophy major about whether chimpanzees can be transgender. In the middle of it, he told me I had a nice ass. I told him he reminded me of Nietzsche. He took it as a compliment. It wasn’t. Nietzsche lost his mind because someone beat a horse. And here I am, arguing about chimps in front of a vending machine that won’t take my dollar.

Then this Nietzsche impersonator crushed up an Adderall with Queering Hegel and snorted it like communion dust. He said it helped him “understand the dialectics of the soul.” I said it helped me understand why nobody likes philosophers.

You know you’re deep in the mess when you’re watching a man with eyeliner and a God complex snort German chemicals under a chandelier that cost more than your tuition. The Germans invented amphetamine in 1887. They’ve been running late ever since.

Anyway, he tried to hit on me. I lost it. Broke the bathroom mirror. Stole his meds. Lexapro. Provigil. Vitamin Sadness. Then he screamed something that sounded like my mother and kicked me out. My conscience is now tar. My sanity’s the consistency of oatmeal. College is killing me softly, and the soundtrack is jazz from a speaker that never works.

My bank account is negative $1.33. My degree is in “figuring it out.” I’m figuring out that I’ve been conned. The tuition was just an entrance fee to a cult that sells anxiety and calls it achievement.

Last night, my roommate broke up with his girlfriend. I heard it through the wall. It sounded like artillery fire mixed with bad acting. Two people trying to out-suffer each other. I started laughing, but it came out as crying.

Later, I Googled, “How many absences before Tulane erases you?” Google replied, “Disappear near me.”

I laughed so hard I lit a cigarette in the dorm room. Someone yelled, “Do you smell smoke?” Yeah, I do. It’s me.

I hammered out 8,000 words on gender performativity for a contest. It was so overwritten it could’ve sued itself for plagiarism. They rejected it for “delusions of grandeur.” They were right. I had them, and they were beautiful.

Tulane’s sports teams are called the “Green Wave.” That sounds about right. A septic wave of tuition checks and hangovers. I’ve been riding it, hoping not to drown.

So yeah, I found myself. In debt.

Thank you, Green Wave. I’m now an under-evolved adult with Spotify Student Premium and the attention span of a traffic light. My diet consists of uppers, resentment, and borrowed everything.

Money doesn’t buy happiness. It rents peace and sometimes gets the deposit back.

Thanks, Tulane, for the memories and the migraines. I’m plugged in like one of those smiling psychopaths who run this country. This article’s worth forty-five bucks if I’m lucky, which means I can almost afford therapy or Taco Bell.

I’ve given up trying to write something clever. I’m just writing the truth, the way a drunk confesses to a wall. I never wanted to be a writer. I’ve barely even read a book cover to cover. I stick to audiobooks—Bukowski, Thompson, Burroughs—the holy trinity of hilarious degenerates. They sound like they’d understand.

There’s a recording studio on campus. I don’t remember the name because I’m always drunk. I wandered in once, grabbed the control board, started playing god with the sound levels. A guy slapped me and said, “You’re disturbing the peace. You’re crossing boundaries.”

I wanted to punch him, but instead I told him he was beautiful and kissed him. He looked terrified, like a vegan at a barbecue. His voice was high, his makeup was perfect, and he smelled like despair. I liked him for a second. Then I didn’t.

Tulane’s buildings are stunning, though. Gothic cathedrals for capitalism. You walk by the arches and wonder if the architects knew they were designing prisons for people with GPAs.

Now I’m starving. No food, no car, no future. I’m writing on my roommate’s laptop, half-naked, half-dead, and fully unemployed. I’ve sent four pieces out today. I’m nineteen, and my parents cut me off after I slept with a forty-two-year-old golfer in the front yard. Turns out my family had cameras. Now I’m famous in my own house.

So thank God I’m drunk and alone again. Whoever reads this, I beg you—laugh at it. Publish it. Or at least Venmo me enough for a burrito and a medium Baja Blast. Because at Tulane, that’s considered financial aid.

I don’t even know if this has a subject anymore. I’m sending it before I sober up. The worm is turning, but maybe it’s just drunk too.

They sell debt. I buy it. They call it education. I call it survival.

Screw Tulane. I’ll turn dying into something.

—Friedrich Nietzsche (probably) Thanks for reading.

P.S. My bed smells awful.

Photo of Daniel Bailey (by Emma Louise Rodgers)

BIO: Daniel Bailey is a songwriter and writer from Madisonville, Louisiana. He creates music, essays, and stories that reflect real life—messy, funny, honest, and human. Whether he’s writing a lyric or a late night thought, Daniel hopes to connect, inspire, and remind people they’re not alone in what they feel. He believes in helping others, laughing often, and sparking creativity wherever it can catch.