What Makes Things Right Again

Not sure if this is the title to a previous post; it popped up in my little title bar and seemed like such a sweet and fitting line.

I'm not really in the mood to write. I have an hour, still, before class begins, and while there's something or another that I would like to be saying to someone I don't seem to have the words for that either. If you live in Portland, you know what the weather is like today: the thunder, the rain, the still, oppressive mugginess. Lyra woke up from the thunder and wouldn't return to bed despite my protests that I would keep her safe. In the end it didn't matter, because it was late. We were late. I can never tell what time it is in my apartment when the blinds are drawn and the sky is blanketed by clouds and rain.

So I'm typing this, not really even thinking, just dancing my fingers around because words will come out of them even when you're thinking about something else. I've written many a poor story that way, little over-trimmed topiaries of stories that are missing all the good parts but somehow still seem to embody a bit of the original intention, whatever that may be, whether it's plant-ness or story-ness or emotionless-ness or, I don't know, pick something. I'm sure you'll be right.

I had never noticed how beautiful it is here in the Memorial on an overcast day; the contrast between the green of the park blocks and the gray of the sky and the sweet tryingly-modern lines of the interior. Such a simple pleasure, really. I was surprised at how comforted I was to walk through the doors after only two weeks of absence, but in many ways I feel like this is my home, the one constant location of my last two years. Over there is where I met Mem for the first time but not the first time, when we both came to hear Fodor speak. If I were to take a right down that hallway, I would come to the place where all the dirty smokers go to talk about everything or nothing, the place where I realized my advisor didn't recall that moment in which I briefly entered the philosophy department and left again, when I asked him how he came to be a philosopher and he said, "Delusions of grandeur." I went back to my science at that moment but returned when everything I read seemed to keep bringing me back here, to these thoughts and these people, and I thought I would at least take a look, investigate, see what there was to find.

Soon, it will be three years, and I will be gone. But I will always miss this place.