I am walking home to my apartment on East Kingsley Street, #407, Apt. 8. It’s the old servants’ quarters in the garret. I trudge up State Street from Angell Hall, leaving behind its heavy marble and bricks, the furious productivity of student bodies hunched over keyboards in the Fishbowl. I have no more reasons to stick around, either my composition students or the potentially enlightening (but generally not) chat of friends in the TA lounge. I don’t want to be on campus any longer, but I don’t want to get home either. I have a lot of work to do—a ridiculous, hopeless amount of writing I can’t avoid anymore. It’s not a matter of wanting to do it; I don’t feel like I even know how.
I cross the street and wander by the big windows of the coffee shops, Café Pretentious, as we call the one, Café Monde, which sells the cheap soup and bread for lunch. I pass store fronts and ignore the enticements of Shaman Drum, the best bookstore I’ve encountered so far in my life. If I can leave it with less than $30 of new books, I consider myself lucky. I cross Liberty St. and start to lose the town to houses—first, the undergrad co-ops with their detritus and busy porches, and then the clipped grass and tidy walks of the more stately residential homes. I’ve lost any sense of why I am here or how I got here. Ostensibly a degree and a job. Intellectual community? I had no clue what I was getting myself into.
Instead, it’s just one foot in front of the other, staying within the white lines as I leave the sidewalk for the asphalt, the asphalt for the sidewalk, on the cross streets. State Street is always busy with cars. Those driving into campus are perhaps six feet from me on my right, slightly speeding to get there while I wander in the cold, sunny afternoon away from it. I arrive at the name streets, designated for people I don’t recognize and won’t learn anything about. In the middle of Lawrence, just a block or so from Kingsley, I wish briefly that a car would veer precipitously to its right, lose control, jerking into the cross street and me. I’d leave the ground for an instant, lightly flying until my head and shoulder and hip hit the pavement. Bruises, blood, perhaps some broken bones. The car would continue on, leave me there. I wouldn’t want to know who the driver was. I just want to be hospitalized, waylaid from arriving at the garret and the inevitable, given a good excuse that has nothing to do with choices I’ve made.
As I turn left off of State onto East Kingsley, I realize an accident would be inadequate. Maybe someone could jump out of the bushes and stab me instead. I have less than a block left of my walk, so it better happen soon.
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3 comments:
I really love how perfectly you describe the overwhelmed feeling of graduate school, or quotidian life, and wishing something would happen so that you wouldn't have to cope. I am also impressed by its completeness. In a small space you evoked a whole complex world of responsibility. I also loved the concreteness of your Ann Arbor description. Shaman Drum rocked.
ah yes grad school angst, this piece evokes more than anything the dread and the sense that every moment, even one as "neutral" as a walk home, is prelude to work, or non-work, as the case may be. i like how you project your mood onto the landscape - cluttered, anonymous, suburban. in fact, your description itself does so much of the work for you that i wonder if the places where you directly state your mood aren't over-stated.
Wow, Christine. Intense.
If you developed and explored this even more, I'd really be interested in hearing what the imagining, longing (?), or fantasy for physical pain expresses. I have a sense of the writer's alientation and existential aloneness, but I wonder about how else the writer feels alone besides as a grad student and the disappointments there.
Great job!
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