ma chambre lumineuse.

This afternoon, when I finally caught my breath, I decided to spend some time in the courtyard behind the communications building on campus. I sat under light filtered through bright green leaves and low-hanging branches, watching a boy strum a guitar.

I have moments where I miss something while I am experiencing it. This happened one night when my friends and I got dressed up to go out to a club on Melrose. I smiled as I took each step down the empty street. I asked them, "Do you guys think you will miss this one day?" They laughed at me, and I never got my response. My question drifted into the air and flew up above us. This happened another afternoon in February, when the rain fell down in thick drops and broke Leslie's umbrella. Leslie and I ran home along Wilshire screaming and laughing so hard I almost couldn't walk. My jeans soaked up so much dirty water that I had to will myself to take each step. As we turned the corner to our apartment, I said to Leslie, "I will always remember this. I am nostalgic for this moment right now, as it's happening."

Similarly, I missed campus today as I sat on the red stone benches. I missed it like it was a piece of me I was letting go. In some ways it is. I have realized far too late that I could have made my own life in Los Angeles. Now, I know. Now, I run around attending lectures about Faulkner and France and the Caribbean, I stay in the Reading Room until it closes, I spend time with my professors. I try to make up for lost time, for misplaced passions. The landscape of campus is itself a home space to me, not so much rigidly defined in its perimeters. Rather, the idea of the kind of light that filters into the windows of Royce is part of my oneiric home, part of my dreamed ideal space. I am letting go of that for broader definitions.

Yesterday, my English professor hugged me good-bye. Other than the fact that this man is my idol and basically the embodiment of everything I love about everything in the world, this hug made me realize how much more contact I have made in the last year, how much closer things have come to my core (if you will excuse the cliche), how much I have made myself vulnerable and offered myself up to be changed by scholarship. I walked with him to the library, and then I stepped inside. As I scanned the bookshelves, my eyes started to water. I couldn't place the emotion: happiness, sadness, satisfaction, resignation, hope. I only know there is some sort of affinity here, some sort of right answer if I only keep asking questions.

Well, now I'm supposed to take what I learned and apply it somewhere. No one ever specified where. I guess I'm just supposed to know. Well, I don't. But I can tell you I'll be searching, I'll be searching endlessly.