There was always something unsettling to me about a large crowd of students having dinner in the cafeteria. The roomful of muffled words, the laughters in between, and the sounds of a collective ding as the forks touched the plates betrayed a sense a youthful innocence like the celebration of a big party. Tired or drunk people were leaving constantly for cold and dark places; yet the celebration went on regardless, in a rather triumphant, everlasting rhyme. And everyone could participate in the celebration; there were no fees for entrance, nor was there penalty for exit; I participated in it when I was the more junior of the students there. But nobody embodied the celebration as much as the celebration embodied them - it seemed, as if when people finally left with the contentment and drunkenness and triteness of a finished party, they have left everything behind, bits by bits, irrevocably without even realizing it.
I had left long time ago. An inner emptiness first began to alert me to everything outside of the party. It was quieter out there, more reserved in the posture for smile and complaint, and gentler and more respectful too. The sunlight that shone through the large windows during summer was replaced with one moon and a few faint stars in the northern sky. The juice machine remained in where it had usually been, the ladies from the catering company Apetito all sat there in front of the cash machine, nodding approvingly while I carried my tray full of food towards them, and, as their delight and professionalism lasted longer and more persistently, my feigned politeness turned into real politeness, and eventually into a vague sense of weariness like the yellow banana lying amongst the food. I reached into my pocket for the plastic campus card with the picture of a fresher person, acknowledged the staffs for their services, put the card back into my pocket, said hi to a couple of familiar faces in their familiar tones, picked up the tray and walked back towards my room. On my way out, the hum of the people did not dim a decibel, and the warm winds from the hallway caressed my face with the same rosiness like when I first came in.
Departures were the saddest when people had to leave, from a place to another place, or from one walk of life to another. The actual moment when they had made the decision to leave, though, was far less distinct. During that time, the other people around were still woefully unaware. And often it was better for them to remain that way - the fickleness of human sentimentality allowed only for brief bursts of grief and farewell, and sometimes, no farewell at all. And hence, when I went back upstairs, hardly anyone had bothered me with such formalities.
Mere meters away from the cafeteria the noises had been dampened into a relic of the past. Corridors and white lights and I were lined up in a perfectly linear progression. The fuzziness of a warm inhabited room was replaced by the ruggedness of a functionalist interior design. Every five seconds the black doors that were embellished into the wall swooshed by. Behind them were either humans or the absence of them; in front of them was me, walking down the path as men have usually walked, surrounded by a ring of silence made up of dead air. Distant people also seemed to be walking; their feet clip-clopped on the ground, meandering downstairs and upstairs and into their room and into their cafeteria, their voices cheerful and remote.
Through the same pair of dorky glasses I had always worn I gazed forth with an empty conviction, with my hands attached to both ends of the food tray, and my belly slightly protruding to compensate for the weight. I was walking on a pair of leather shoes I bought from a Karstadt near Stachus back in Munich. In them I wore a pair of black socks I had put on earlier that had strange stripes and ugly logos that would run up my ankles. I was also wearing jeans with a fresh pair of underwear inside. The jeans were rubbing against my legs just like the underwear was rubbing against my ass. My woeful unawareness of their presence bequeathed me a sense of reassurance of my own impeccability, and my mind was then free to roam in an endless series of self-referencing metaphysics about the soon-to-be-eaten dinner. Myriad other things also flashed by my mind and I remembered nothing about them. The fickleness of my sentimentality only allowed for brief bursts of deep examination and provoking thoughts, and sometimes, no thought at all.
And just as I was about to reach my room, a sudden emptiness struck me the same way the immensity of an immense building struck a disinterested visitor. I grabbed the keys from my right pocket as I approached a black door that was embellished into the wall, the one with my name tag hung next to it, and beeped in.
In there, was all that is my life, in this College Nordmetall, in this Bremen-Vegesack.
