Founded in the fall of 1991, Laurel Moon is Brandeis' oldest, national literary publication. Each issue we publish features original work from undergraduate students.
There was laughter, in the beginning of summer. Now you get high off silences that your own family cannot afford you. Never realized how loud people could be when in love. Now you go out during the days with no particular agenda, detailing every human encounter you have the privilege or misfortune to recall, as if love was an artifact in a museum that you have dedicated your life to understanding, long stripped of any signs of life, as if it was dead from the moment you heard the word.
Go to the library on a cloudy, unremarkable day and discover the miracle of outdoor wifi. Seek out people with similar afflictions to you, like croc wearing and friendlessness. Do not approach them, for you are so disgusting that they would be loath to admit any form of kinship. On your computer, pretend you are an important person doing important things. Answering emails from important people, writing proposals, or your magnum opus. Do not let on to them that you are just as lost as anyone, but you have become too tired to keep wandering. Debate, for the forty somethingth time deleting or downloading whichever app currently has you in its chokehold. Let weakness prevail, for the forty somethingth time. Forget, briefly, how to spell forty. (fourty?)
Focus on themes, like muscular calves and asses, like elbows and endings and widow’s peaks. The kind of thing you used to do with your mother, two lone people watchers, before she found her person, two months ago. Watch the gym bros with stretched out tank tops, the screaming children with colorful dresses and scooters and a lack of spatial awareness, an obtuseness to everything but the self.
These last few weeks are to be forgotten. The sweaty nights and lukewarm dates, the watching of big groups of young people who, together, create an energy that is beyond you, that you have gone without for the longest time, that you both despise and crave, resent and envy. You are leaving tomorrow, leaving for good (minus Thanksgiving and winter break and spring break and summer.) Maybe not for good. Maybe for mediocre, or decent, or “ok” stretched out with too many Y’s. But you’re leaving. Aren’t you?
Remember the pile of clothes at home, waiting to be sorted and crammed into duffel bags. Close your computer, gather your things. Make a slow start towards standing. Say goodbye to these nameless faces, and hope that there is life for you elsewhere.