Watching Faces get Younger

Entry for June 8, 2007

6/6/07

Last Day of Exams before Summer

Today is the last day for a lot of students on campus. Exams are over with and the summer calls them away. Some will never return. Some people I know are leaving for “the real” world. Every year some people I know make this journey. I hope they find it. I hope they find the real world that they have been working towards, I never did. Time passes quickly in this world. Campus life is like watching faces get younger while knowing it is you getting older. Every year is the same, they just keep getting more nostalgic. People and faces of the past flow away from my memory. I remain on campus year after year as new turns into old and fades away. Holding on would be like carving an x into the river to mark where I have been. Now there are huge bins of carpet and chairs and hangars and books. Stuff you would hold on to if it mattered. The dorms are emptied every year. Most years it rains. Soon people who live here will be looking through the bins. I know, I used to. It is a lonely reward at the making of a ghost town. The ghosts leave their stuff. I never knew why. Some of it is trash. There is good stuff there though. Futons, computers…a friend of mine once found a jar of money. Some ghost had been too impatient to carry it with him. Summer tugged on him and he relented, leaving his jar in the bin with all the papers of test scores and dates. These things which occupy us for the whole school year become unneeded. I took notes for hours upon end. I sat under bright florescent bulbs on cold wooden chairs. I listened and thought about and then listened more. Teachers spilled knowledge while I doodled and shook with boredom. I wanted to give up and quit, but I continued to the end. I battled and raged over papers and essays and take home quizzes, blank maps with cities to label and rivers to draw. Now this place is like a blank map. All of the people who made it alive are gone. They left their notes and quizzes and tests in the bin. Searching through them makes me feel lost. What is important? What do they hold to? What will be discarded? Who will find it a gem and polish it up? Will it rain before they come? Every year it seems to rain on cue. This year the rain came early may leave dry the ghost bins. I hold on to my notes much too long. I have notes from classes that are years ago. I keep them at home. I will never read them. I tell myself I will but I won’t. I keep them there because they are marks in the river, and it still might rain. (6/8/07 – it didn’t rain)

Does the library make people meticulous or are meticulous people attracted to the library. Both maybe.