then, there were six

It's ten minutes to eleven and all is quiet. There's a sleeping Kasi in the room next to me and a tired Maren below. Even now, I'm not used to a quiet house at such an hour. I need an Emily to run circles around defining-the-relationship conversations and other such love scenarios; a Katie across the room to reassure my color theory project turned out just fine and that my bed is beckoning; a Jen on the couch in the kitchen, wrapped up in a blanket reading Shackleton's Endurance, shivering with every sentence; a Becca, back on the brown carpet, headset in her ears, on the phone with a boy in Hawaii, her side of the conversation filtering out into the hallway where there's a Moof doing sit-ups below old Mormon Ads and favorite movie lines.

Three months ago, Greg and I sat in a car parked outside of F.Smith Hall, talking the wintry night away as the heater blew out heavy heat. Florescent light filtered between the blinds in the kitchen of apartment 161 below, the same kitchen where we ate taco salad and lemon poppy seed muffins on Sundays. Greg's brother occupies those same cinder block walls, making his own memories of boy-girl apartment vs. apartment Ward Wars and campus crushes. I'm sure the telephone held hostage still hangs on the wall. It probably hasn't been dangled like Rapunzel's braids right above the girlish grasp of six desperate co-eds, forced to serenade it to its rescue, "Row Row Row Your Boat" its salvation song. I bet the fire extinguisher hasn't been removed and taken to the Law Library during reading days to interview any and all stricken with the Frenzy of Finals. Hopefully the holes left from our Ceiling of Love have been patched after my white gesso failed to do a permanent job.

It's strange how time marches on without the slightest sense of self; without asking if we want it to stop so we can take a good long look at what was; what never will be again. How the music of Life keeps playing, the lyrics changing before we catch the tune. And, strange how we tell ourselves that change is good; that it will bring about The New. That the uncharted course of our own Shackleton's Adventure, our own Endurance Mission, may bring the chill of change but, no matter the storm, no matter the noise, the still will come. Even if it's just in the form of a quiet moment at the close of some insignificant day, to record a few thoughts about the past.