The sky this morning was a bit grayish from having rained. I saw, through the window only a bit subdued white. I was the first person to rise up and leave, with neither the festivity of a finished party, nor the relief of a landed plane. It took a certain kind of courage and emotional transition to be able to just walk away. Every day I willingly commit myself into various prisons, and after 150 minutes, out of them again.
I would usually bring a pencil to write down a few notes; however eventually I realized that these notes were not written down for the value that they supposedly convey, but were for my reassurance of feeling the tip of the pencil sliding across the paper, amongst various predetermined lines. I would shroud myself with an almost Islamic relief when I sensed the pencil's quiet brush - the black trail of ink that it left behind just so animated, persisted, and meant. Though like having sex, the process of opening a notebook and beginning to write was distinctly dissimilar from the closing and ceasing of it. Weary of the back-and-forth inflation and deflation of my elatedness, I opted instead to bring the book of Infinite Jest. A hefty piece with a page count that I seemed unlikely ever to match. Possibly due to its verbosity and weight, it represented to me something almost much more earthly and intransient. When I held the book, I had the same simplistic joy of holding up a wad of brick, and was somehow emboldened to declare war on whatever that had dared to fuck with me. I read the book in-between sessions of the Diversity Management course like having a thought in-between non-thoughts during a trip from Bremen-Vegesack to Bremen-Burg, not for the actual advancement of human affairs, but for the masturbation of it.
Grabbing the umbrella from to my left, and the book from to my right, I acceded towards the door as if I had maximum-volume punk rock blasting in my ears. It was moist, windy, and slightly cold as Bremen had always been. The lane immediately in the front had almost a layer of mud upon it. But I stepped over it with the gist of a mini-stampede. Like an anonymous pedestrian leaving the warmth of a street-side cafe and unto the rain, I opened the umbrella with a certain resignation and grace. I walked diagonally towards a residential college where I didn't reside. And under my umbrella, I was joined at first by a gentleman from Pakistan, and then by a lady from Belarus. Though soon after turning left, they both went away.
In The Prophet, Gibran wrote "we wanderers, ever seeking the lonelier way, begin no day where we have ended another day; and no sunrise finds us where sunset left us". And henceforth, amongst the howling wind, amongst the scattered mutters of the passing students, and amongst the silent pirouette of leaves from afar, I wandered alone.
The handle of my umbrella pushed me in its firm grip the tenderness of a wildflower. I stood briefly at the door, retracting the umbrella to its original shape, and resumed into the staircases of College Nordmetall. The drops of rain were falling still, collapsing themselves on the windows at the corridor. They formed sheets of water that blurred the landscape outside. And the contour of my own reflection was barely discernible; but I could tell immediately that it was me, blended in with sky.
Like a car that was parked in the garage when both the speaker and woofer were turned off, the moment I entered my room and the black wooden door was shut behind me, all of the metaphysics that had previously been tacked onto me were sieved out like the lyrics of my favorite song. I sat down on a dull and strange silence, while the dim lights lightly quivered at the curtain that was just closed.
