Kind of like the army because you’re all there for ostensibly the same reason but from vastly different backgrounds. Skill-sets, dreams of escape, circumstances brought you here. You hug yourself to sleep, making lonely conversations. Walk across the new fields unsteady as a colt or baby giraffe taking unique steps. You’re a triumph of engineering. Quickly moving along the campus paths from a high window you hear the great cascade, notes tearing after each other that when they catch fall into silence. You see how silence is something to fall into. Once again you forget you are young. You believe desire will never desert you. There’s a boy in your bed. There’s girl in your bed. Outside the dark window the tree divides space in august orange segments. You’ve seen a million trees. But not this one you’re sitting under, the insects like a cloud of thoughts, each with a distinct life cycle. Together they thunder the mind. Four years is what you have. Then they will pass you into a world without questions. Whatever you profess, you are. You are your own professor.
Merridawn Duckler is a writer from Oregon and author of Interstate (dancing girl press), Idiom (Harbor Review), Misspent Youth (rinky dink press), and Arrangement (Southern Most Books). Nonfiction published in The Ekphrastic Review, At Length, Ruminate, Pembroke, and Buckman Journal. She won the Invisible City flash CNF contest judged by Heather Christle. She’s an editor at Narrative.
Image: “View between St. Joseph Hall and the Science Center 1940-1949” from The Dollar Store Estate Sale Collection
Pine Hills Review 