Pangs of something

I am sitting at a table in one of the classrooms at NYUSH. I feel the table shaking slightly because Julius sits next to me, writing as he does in the notebook where he seems to do all of his thinking. He is wearing a peacoat inside. He looks extraordinarily European.

It’s finals week here and the office building--university is extremely quiet. It does not have the manic, unhinged quality of finals week that I always relished at Bryn Mawr. I used to love going into the library at that time, when it would be open 24-hours a day, and soak in the absolutely reckless vibrations of every other stressed undergraduate. Once during a writing center shift, an older woman called me over to the beanbag chair where she was wrapped in one of our communal blankets. “Wake me up at nine PM,” she said, as if I were nursemaid, or her mother. “A fews ago my alarm didn’t go off and I woke up at midnight. All the lights were off and I had to call public safety to let me out of the locked library.” Finals week should feel a bit like that, like waking up in the dead, cold library at midnight because you decided falling asleep at someone’s workplace was the way to go. But now, the hallways are empty and there is a sense of letdown that is decidedly un-December.

A few weeks ago an Amazon package arrived from the US for me. I fetched it from the university mailroom and brought it up to the fifth floor. Inside was a tiny Christmas tree and miniature ornaments, made in China and sent to the US, where my mother picked them out and had them sent from the warehouse to me in China again. Opening it, it felt briefly like an integration from an old life to the life I have now.