The fluorescent lights of the university library hummed a monotonous lullaby. Sofía stared at the blank Word document on her laptop screen. At the top, in Arial 12, it read: "Cover Page."
Sofía hesitated. "A story about a man who drove a train for thirty years and then couldn't afford the ticket to ride it anymore." portada de un trabajo de universidad
A boy sat down at the table next to hers. He was older, maybe a grad student, and he wasn't writing. He was drawing. With a fine-tipped black pen, he was illustrating a fantastical city on his own cover page—towers that bent like trees, buses with wings. The fluorescent lights of the university library hummed
She deleted it.
Faculty: Social Sciences Student: Sofía Márquez Title: The Elasticity of Public Transport Demand... "A story about a man who drove a
She had spent three days researching the economic impact of the Buenos Aires subway fare hikes. She had read seventeen academic papers, built complex graphs, and written over four thousand words. But this—this blank white square—felt like an insurmountable wall.
Her father, a subway driver for thirty years, had lost his job last spring. The fare hike wasn't just a statistic to her; it was the reason her family had stopped eating meat on weekdays. And now, she had to reduce that reality to a sterile cover page.