It feels like the whole building is about to fall down on you, and you’re trapped under a thick and heavy blanket of smoke, and the noises of wood and paper and textile burning and turning into ash fill your ears like the blazing sound a fire makes when your mother twists the knob on the stove, just that it sounds a million times worse. It feels like the fire is chasing you away to the window, and off you go beside one, hoping that you could just break the glass and jump into the air with the falling rain, to land on the ground where the sensation of pain might actually be more bearable, bearable in the sense that it’d be quick and easy – like a sudden jab of a powerful drug straight into your system.

But no, final exams do not conveniently inflict pain like falling off a building or injections do. They are like fire that slowly eats you away, that slowly burns every strip and strand of your body, causing you to feel so much pain until you reach a saturation point, a point where the marginal pain that you are capable of feeling actually reaches zero. In that case, you have been completely burned (out).

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