found drama

You are back home (???) on the St. Mary’s campus, only the sense of scale has changed. Has the campus grown? Have you shrunk to minuscule proportions? You are back for a new semester and though you have moved in to your new room, you have not been back there in… weeks? You have been in classes and have been to parties, but you have not been back to that room. This party ¹ is just now breaking up, and you are just now thinking that it is time to return home. But the trudge back to your room is long. You are burdened somehow. slow. You cannot run. You can barely walk. On your way back, you realize that you have no idea where your room actually is. You know the general vicinity–the quarter of campus, sure, and possibly even the building–but which door? And what combination to the door? ² You stop along the way to relieve yourself. The (public) restroom’s floor has a pool of urine, and you notice that you are barefoot.

1. It’s not a freshman mixer, it can’t be–some 70+ year old man was asking you if you were the one teaching the High Performance MySQL seminar. He is genial and nice about the whole thing (when you explain that no, you are not the one giving the lecture) but you find that you are overly embarrassed about not knowing, and you spend the rest of your time at the party trying to avoid the man’s gaze.[↩]
2. You do remember that there are no actual physical keys. Of all the things about the campus that have changed, that part at least as not. But this is worse (you think to yourself) than all those times where you have suddenly remembered that you haven’t been to a single Calculus class all semester long–because what kind of person doesn’t swing home once in a while? And what kind of person doesn’t at least remember how to get into their own room?[↩]

About Rob Friesel