Chapel Hill is waking up around me. The sky's diffuse gray glow isn't yet bright enough to deactivate -- no, the closest set of streetlights just turned off. The past couple of days were very wet, but now it's just cold, especially here on the 8th floor landing in the north stairwell of Granville South. From the looks of things, the sun won't be making much effort to improve that today.
Sunday night was the last all-nighter (at least, the last academic one). The Linguistics exam began at noon, and I must've nodded off in mid-sentence at least a dozen times. Somehow, I stayed coherent -- it wasn't until I jerked back to full consciousness that I forgot what I'd been writing. It came out fine, eventually. And then I got some lunch, or whatever one calls a three o'clock meal after thirty hours mostly awake, promised myself that I'd postpone sleeping until sunset in order to regularize my schedule, sat down on my bed, and immediately blacked out for seven hours, interrupted only to bid Sam a brief and groggy farewell when he came in to say goodbye.
I finally woke a little before midnight, showered, dressed, and got a nasty cheeseburger from Time-Out, then puttered around on the internet for a while, then wandered into the lounge and turned on the TV. Not expecting to find anything worth watching, I was happily surprised to stumble upon a few hours of X-Files reruns. And now I'm sitting here on a concrete step, tapping on my laptop.
It's been harder than I expected to see everyone go. Not the people that I tried to develop meaningful friendships with with, but the people I've lived with and incidentally grown close to. Dav, who has often paused his fervent defenses of Christianity to point out the hottest girl in any given room. Wilkes, who insisted that I have some fun on the last day of classes, and, finding all the good parties already ending at two in the morning, gave me one cheap beer after another along with a fair fraction of his life story. Dan, with whom I recently had an inexplicable and spontaneous conversation about certain problems males face, which shall not be detailed here. Sam, who persistently refused to let me embrace my introversion to too dangerous a degree. Steve and Jay and the rest of the Halo 2 crew. Oh, it's been fun.
posted on Tuesday, May 09, 2006
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