A Clear Midnight

I was at the office late the other night, and walking back through Chinatown to the Metro, I flashed back to walking back from the library at college after it closed at 1 in the morning. Up the hill towards Mead Chapel, stars above and mountains behind. In my memory there's snow on the ground, which is more accurate than not, save for those few precious warm nights in September and May. A college campus is never completely deserted, but that walk was always quiet, and it gave me a few moments alone with my thoughts between studying and bed -- "away from books, away from art, the day erased, the lesson done."

So much of the college experience is about the people you're with -- the professors whose words you remember more than any book they assigned you, the friends you drank with and played Quidditch with and were silly in the dining hall with, and all the other classmates who formed the backdrop. So much of what matters to us about places in general is the people in them. So it's nice to remember a little pocket of the college experience that was just mine.