is the light dying? shall we rage now?

watching scary movies, the girls shrilled and the guys cracked wise; everyone drank white russians and microbrews. one girl asked for a martini, in a coy whisper—she got it, courtesy of the host's chivalry. the puppy gnawed on people's fingers; it also ate the back of one girl's earring—the same girl who needed a martini in a kitchen stocked with kahlua and leffe.

it is so warm in here. i want to live here, where it is warm, busy and friendly, and even annoying people are welcome because we just take them easy.

L looks like a tree in the desert, lean and strong and unadorned. her smile is bright and she seems positive. her room is still a gypsy whirl, like it was the last two years. oh, those last two years! the cold days, the rain and frozen sidewalks, the shuddering shuffle from my dormitory to her brightly-painted house, seem like a distant dream. the tiny town wears its auburn and blue right now, but being at L's house makes me remember what i tried sometimes to escape by fleeing the campus to her sanctuary. it was the bedraggled aspect the trees will wear in dreary november and february, when there is nothing going on, no money to be made, and loneliness breathing frostily against the windows of my narrow room.

what would it be like to live it again this year, to try to make the town's acquaintance from where i now stand?

listening to her talk about professors and class discussions doesn't make me feel old, as i might have expected. instead, i feel like i'm no age—i feel feeble and green—i just want a new thing. i see that maybe she's running the same path as i did, and she fears falling into a rut after graduation, and maybe that fear will provoke her to commit to something she doesn't want or need. but i don't feel like i'm looking down from the upper floors; i'm listening to her with the hope that she will puzzle out an answer for both of us.

and what would our friendship be like if i were only meeting her just now?

undergraduate life is like a solar eclipse. we could be long-term students, but these strange four years where expectation lifts its hands off us, and our potential is intently regarded, are unlikely to grace us again. this kind of time will never be ours again unless we fight for it. (of course, we could argue that the amount of money we paid for this time makes a fight unnecessary. this time is not purely a gift.)

what is a gift is these years' full occupation of us, if we give ourselves to them. i see it in L, and i wish on the harvest moon to have it again. the greatest life is when what they called suspended reality is your reality, when something we do proves so startlingly original that expectations fall back in disconcerted amazement, making them always afterward think twice before they try to impress us into their service again.

we have the work ethic. i hope we are so lucky as to use it, L. we deserve it, because we are responsible folks.