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.