Hollowness is the last day of the quarter, sitting at my desk, studying for the last final, my eyes bleary from reading paragraphs barely more substantial than a corpse’s whisper. I feel the sun coming down upon me through the blinds, a pattern of dark and light, dark and light projected against institutional carpeting. The light feels good and the dark doesn’t so I draw the blinds up to the ceiling and crack the window.
Summer slides in through the mesh screen and over the sill accompanied by the sound of numb evenings spent on a southern shore. Bob Marley’s “Jamming” is rising from a room on what I guess is the second floor. I’m standing in my cell on the third. I think I hear some Beastie Boys from another open window across Oxford Circle, an awkward cacophony of sounds meeting over the cars of the last few frustrated souls who can’t yet make a clean break from academia.
And then I see her down below, the girl whose name I can’t now remember, walking toward the parking lot. Under one arm she carries an ironing board and under the other an abused six-string guitar. I recall that guitar and playing a few sloppy power chords, and then sleeping with her until the morning after a night of too much beer and too many happenings no longer remembered. As she opens the door to her VW bug, she slides the bucket seats forward, resting the guitar on top a hamper of folded winter clothes, and I feel damned by my lack of remembering anything between us. I can see she has gained the freshman ten over the past year and maybe a few more.
Though she is that girl - the one I would awkwardly smile at from across the Dining Commons, but never found a good enough reason to talk to.
I open the window as far as it will go and feel the heat of the sun on my face. All that has come before burns in a majestic auto de fe, all the sleepless nights, and the books uncracked, all the second-hand smoke inhaled in rooms sealed tight from the February cold. It all burns this summer day. Emerson Hall is empty now of its life. We few are the last and cursed holdouts.
From somewhere down below comes the wail, “No Woman, No Cry.”