Tea, Fire and Boredom

Finals = Over

I had my last final yesterday morning. I woke up at the ungodly hour of 7AM and, for once, saw the Princeton morning in all of its sunrise glory. I made my way over to the Friend Center, took the test and walked out of the building. I am now a free man. All of the pressure, weight and strain have been banished for another semester. I am done. And yet, I feel exactly the same as earlier in the week. It’s odd. Perhaps it’s a sign that my finals were nothing more than a small hole in the road, successfully maneuvered around. To me, the main difference is that half my friends are preparing to leave and half are teetering on the brink of their sanity. I’ll leave them to their stresses; I’ll be engineering and calculating plenty of stresses and strains next year. It’s weird to think that right now I could be heading home with nothing more in mind than the warmth of dogs and family. I could be gone and away from here. And yet I’m grounded here for the next few months. I’ll have a front row ticket to the campus slowly emptying out. With each passing day, more and more people prepare to take off. They carry boxes around of stuff and reminisce about the year’s memories. By choosing to stay here longer than most of my peers, I’ll be able to see the campus life slowly die for the summer. It is an experience of life. It’s like growing old and watching all of your old friends die off, one by one. The speed is the worse part. The cycle draws itself out over weeks and weeks and weeks. Each day becomes a new puzzle to feel who or what is missing.

I am enjoying this new weather. It’s been hot and a little humid lately. Not too humid. But the day is so warm that the evening air is cooled to an ideal temperature. When I was little, days like this in late August were our favorite time of the year. The longer days allowed us to play late into the evening. And the warm air made it such that we could act as if it was the day. This is one of my favorite parts of summer. It is the time when the warmth and life of the day meet the darkness and mystery of the night. The summer presents the best time to explore the night. You can travel through its darkness uninhibited by coats and other cold weather apparel. The night becomes the day. And the day becomes the night.