This feels like the beginning of something you can only describe in French.
I'm walking on the same streets, the same paths. The wind tastes the same, runs through my beard the same way it used to. The way the light is laid out over the grasses and wet brick and concrete sides of the buildings is familiar. The building standing like sentries, reminding me of something.
I've been here before.
Even the people seem like replacements, mock-ups, stand-ins. Not a day has gone by wherein I haven't almost waved or said hello to someone who was at both immediately familiar, and entirely new to me.
There's a phrase in Latin that can describe what I'm experiencing. I'm sure of it.
The classes are all the same. I've been in this lecture hall, that crowded room, this musky library. The seats are new and there a new blackboard but I'm not fooled. I see through the new coat of paint. I am experiencing the past in real time.
Despite the modest adjustments in landscape, this is still old territory. In spite of the repairs, the new paint, the updated awnings, this is nothing new.
There was a wing place there before, though it had a different name. That building used to have a side entrance. That group's office used to be on the 2nd floor. We called it something different. We used it in a different way. That wasn't there but it's just like the thing we used to do to make due. It was our before it existed. They've inherited our dreams and watched them come to life, but they're still our dreams. This is still our place.
This is just as it was before. And yet...
I bang around campus, surrounded and lonely. I say, "The weather is getting to me," and pull my coat tightly around myself, even with my zipper up to my neck. "I need sleep," I say, and chug a Red Bull. "I should have eaten breakfast," I say, ignoring my bacon breath and the bits of egg in my beard.
In class, I remind myself to pay attention, even though I'm surrounded by the stink of ink from my pen. I shake out my hand, rubbing and massaging my palm, reminding myself to keep up, to take notes, to stay awake. I arrive to my next class early and it feels like the first time. I take a seat in front and remind myself to do this every time, even though I always do. I feel the guilt of not having my homework, of not being prepared, of having missed so much class it's a wonder I remember where the room is.
And then pull my homework out of my bag. I contribute to discussion. I ace the exam and get a head start on my paper.
Just like before, only not at all like before.
I'm afraid of failing. I'm still haunted by a past that hangs over my vision like a veil, telling me the way things were and the way this ought to be, telling me that I'm lazy, that I'm a failure, that something is going to happen to ruin everything and that that's ok because I'm not working as hard as I should anyway. That is my mantra. That is my "proof". That is the only proof I have.
Yet, here I am regardless, feeling like a stranger possessed with another man's drive, another man's constitution. Whatever this is, this is the thing that is different.
And this has gotten me to the halfway mark. Just like before. Just like never before.
* * * * *
"No way in, go in, measure"- S. Beckett
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