Yesterday, I visited the library I spent probably over half my waking moments during college in, to give a conservative estimate. I hadn’t been there since May, when I finished a horrible essay and wanted nothing else than to sit on the papa-san chair in our common room and kvetch about something non-academic.
Nothing had changed, not even me, not in any way that would be relevant to a library. The funny thing about time passing, which teachers have probably absorbed into their bone marrow, is that when one set of people leave, they are immediately replaced by jarringly similar counterparts. I thought I saw someone I recognized, but it was only the slightly updated version. Different face, same hair, same clothing, same manner of walking. I wonder who I once replaced, who has replaced me.
When you live in a different building every year of college, any kind of consistency is appreciated. And, in that regard, the library has amassed a collection of moments that may or may not add up to more than the sum of its parts. I suppose it’s what I thought about when I walked in - the basement classroom where I had my first fiction class, the third floor stacks where I studied for the LSAT and marveled how quickly time could pass when taking timed test sections, the second floor stacks where I tried to study for the next day’s final but ended up reading three copies of Entertainment Weekly instead, the first floor computer clusters where I wrote way too many literature essays that scrambled for any semblance of an original idea, the second floor computer clusters where I fell asleep onto the keyboard while applying to grad school, the lobby where I convinced a friend to break up with her boyfriend as she called me from the bathroom of his dorm.
The strangest moment was walking into the periodicals room, where I did most of my studying. There was the table I sat in when I was first started to come here and read To the Lighthouse in one afternoon freshman year, saying to myself “I think this is changing my entire outlook on literature… and therefore, life” while watching the clock because I had promised myself that I would leave by 6 PM because it was Saturday and I needed to get a life (ha, no). The desks by the window where I wrote all my fiction and playwriting assignments. The tables where I stared at piles of slides, wrote one-page response papers, made friends from the strangest coincidences, drank way too much Tropicana orange juice, exhausted my iPod, and got shushed by more people than I ever cared to shush.
Strange that you can walk into a place and remember all these things. I used to sit around and eavesdrop on upperclassmen talking about the perils of being over the age of twenty-one. Now, I’m three months past 22 and think I’ve accepted the reality of always feeling vaguely dislocated. I suppose it’s not exactly ironic that it’s a library that grounds me. But there’s an upside to all of this - I can actually check out books I want to read now! You know, ones not entitled “The History of Tropical Disease” or “Philanthropy and the blah blah of I don’t care”. And that is worth at least two terrible five-page papers about the most asinine of historical anecdotes.
