The Rest

I arrived on campus for the last time, pensive, brooding behind the wheel. Everything was white, heavy, silent. The entrance to the garage hung open like a great grey toothless mouth, a slick black strip of asphalt lolling out of it like a disobedient tongue.

In the library, the stink of stress-sweat hung in the air like a thick and desperate warning. Students were strewn about haphazardly; a woman in a corner chewing a bagel, a young man sleeping heaped against the wall with his hand stuffed in a text book, three young ladies (that may as well have been one that could have five) huddled around a small table littered with a disaster of books and papers, one chewing her bottom lip, one chittering like a cicada, one lost in bug-eyed wonder, leaning over the splay of books and papers, rapt.

I fart loudly and do not apologize. There is no need. This is an asylum.

 * * * * *

Less than 20 minutes to go before the exam and the room is already mostly filled. There are plenty of new faces. One of them is weeping openly, shamelessly, great heaving gaspings and snortings. Someone, it seemed, moved in to offer comfort but, incredibly, asked to borrow notes.

A girl just asked me if this is the room class is held in. I can't bring myself to respond without sarcasm. I pretend I haven't heard her. She pretends she hasn't asked.

Beyond these walls, a lazy dawn is announcing herself. Students mill like ants through honey. A young man props himself against a dirty window and lights a cigarette. I see none of this, yet I am sure.

This is how it always is.

* * * * *

I have not slept. I cannot sleep. I must sleep. I leave the exam room, dazed and accomplished. It's all over and it's all over. I'm out of the building and on the sidewalk and behind the seat of my car, keys in hand. It occurs to me, "I won't be back. Not for a long while."

I smile. Then I start the car and take the long way home.

The Last Day

I'm sitting in the library as I write this. This is remarkable given that, for most of the semester, it was nearly impossible to find a computer that wasn't already occupied. From day one, the library was a crowded whispering circus of students banging and angling to and fro. Now that we've come to the end of the semester, the literal last day of classes, that's all changed.

The library, once a sub-audible thrumming hive of students, has been rendered strangely vacant. The students here are few and far between, a remainder, and echo, relics on the shore yet to be swallowed by the sea. I'm at a hub of six computers and I'm the only one here. More than half of the computers on this floor are abandoned, powered but powerless, their monitors made sullen black cataracts peering into nothingness.

It all feels very Twilight Zone and important. Rare, even, as if someone should be taking photos or writing poems about this, as if someone learned and wizened should be called to bear witness before this and they both pass into memory and then nothingness, as if they never were, as if they never happened or  mattered.

Next week is the beginning of finals, and the library will come alive. This swept and painted menagerie will be undone, writhing and thundering with co-eds wide-eyed and determined to make up for a semester's worth of neglect in a single afternoon. They'll bleat and tear papers and howl and cry and beg no one in particular for deliverance from their ignorance. Their generic prayers will tremble in the wind like dead leaves, their lonely woeful mouths making the sound of dead and dying things. They want nothing specific - just not this. Anything but this! Anything but suffering!

They'll spit sulfur and sweat violence, pounding at the keyboard, the clicking of the keys a useless rattling incantation. I will wade through their tears like a minister who, recognizing the irretrievably damned, passes over them. "I cannot help you", I'll think and not say. "I want to but cannot. It is the way it has always been. You were warned." They will, some of them, repent. They will, some of them, die again and again before surrendering to their fate, muted by the swaying noose of the gallows, men and woman made sullen in the shadow of their groaning eldritch truth. They swallow their fate like sand and are purified by it. They are fated and made by this weary fate.

Finals week is upon us. The curtain rises on this, a new tragedy. Act I, Scene I.

We are all damsels.

The Big Push

Fair warning: It's about to get weird. And biological. Indulge me.

There have been more than a few moments were, just before class, I felt the abdominal grumbles and pressures signaling that I'd have to have a "seat", and soon. It instigates a very unique form of panic - "Do I or don't I?" which, at times, becomes "Must I?"

The trick has been learning how urgent "urgent" is, and, only slightly less importantly, how long of a "seat" I'd have to take. There's nothing more awkward than rushing through the final minutes of a decent sit-down and scrambling to class with the telltale "Deuce" waddle. It's the sort of thing that you may not recognize normally, but, when you've recently engaged in the practice, your eye tends to be able to pick out those who might be able to sympathize. More often than not, I wait - mostly because I don't want to chance being late, but also because I don't want to corrupt what is supposed to be a period  of deep relaxation and meaningful reflection coupled with contemplative hand-held gaming. 

There's a point to this. I swear. 

Finals week is upon us - upon me, really. Because, even though it's something that everyone here will experience, sometimes at the same time, and even in the same room, it is ultimately a very personal experience. It's important to go into it calm and relaxed, confident that you're having done this countless times before without disaster is reason enough to expect a positive outcome.

Yes that is a poop metaphor. No, I am not proud of myself. 

Thanksgiving has come and gone. The last of the pies and turkeys have forced themselves upon me, leaving me sweaty and taut and helpless. I can feel the various sips and bites imparting their goodness unto me, a warm universal glow of delight issuing from my abdomen as I surrender to nature's process, relishing the echo of the feast. 

But, hark, there is... a remainder. "Must I?" is a memory. Now there is only "I Shall!" Now there is only "I Must!"

So, yeah, finals week is a lot like taking a dump. 

It's an unpleasant, awful thing that no one likes to think about for very long. But, if properly prepared for, it can also be a thing that leads to a deep sense of personal satisfaction and accomplishment.

The semester is all but over and I know now that I am full of it. I only hope that when it comes time for the big push, I am up to the task. 

...mostly, though, I just wanted to talk about poopin'.