I'm approaching the finish line on this (what ended-up being a crazy) semester and hoping to be back here soon-ish. Until then, it's papers and presentations and one exam. Nothing like law school. Which means I'm relatively sane, just busy. I won't say I miss law school finals (I don't, not at all), but this time of year does make me miss the people that meant the absolute most to me during those utterly insane (the-psych-ward-or-the-hospital-isn't-far-off insane) weeks of early December. In the memory and honor of those days, I thought I would re-post this, originally written sometime in 2010 when I had finally recovered...
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Saturday night dates held hands under chandeliers. The white lights
bounced off the restaurant windows, competing with the holiday lights
hung by the city. We had missed the tree lighting ceremony in the haze
of all the days after Thanksgiving. Long days that passed too quickly
but merged into one another, never ending. We spent countless
afternoons that turned into nights under the buzz of the florescent
lights in the school's basement lounge. We each had our place on the
ratty couches next to the water fountain that reminded us of its
existence with a loud roar every thirty-five minutes. Or whenever
somebody stepped over us to use it. We tried not to glare, but the
nights got long and we got punchy - our filters disintegrated. We
laughed when I ran upstairs to get us play-dough, but we pulled the
colored mounds apart piece by piece when the statutes tangled themselves
together and refused comprehension. We ran on anxiety, adrenaline, and
caffeine.
When we stopped counting the days after
Thanksgiving and started counting the days before exams, we moved into
her tiny apartment and brewed pots of coffee to calm our nerves. Hours
measured by days of class notes and pages in our outline. Taking turns
explaining what the others didn’t understand; shifting places - from the
couch to the chair to the floor and back to the couch; cursing at
google docs for reformatting, pinwheeling, rejecting edits. We would
negotiate end times, but two against one usually meant one a.m. Sleep,
shower, and a Mister Bagel pick-up before a 7:30 a.m. arrival. Some
nights, when the class included only two of us, we worked until 2:30
a.m. I slept on her couch and woke to the alarm at 6:30 a.m. A coaxing
boyfriend helped pry us out of deep sleep. On nights when I returned
home, I would crash into bed without seeing the pillow. The nights I
didn’t, I watched the walls close in on me.
Winter
came early that year, and the weather guaranteed us a snowy day. So we
hauled our text books and our code books and our laptops and our
sweatpants to her tiny apartment intent on feeling cozy and enjoying the
snowfall. Days into reading “week” and days from its end, we could
fill the day with comforts and ignore some of the anxiety. We laughed
that day. Drunk on late nights and early mornings, coffee light and
sweet, hours of tax statutes, days of sweatpants, and the sight of
falling snowflakes, we belted out in hysterics. When the sun set and
she made coffee for the hour, we crowded into her kitchen, opened her
backdoor, and took turns grabbing fists full of the snow piled on her
porch railing. When it became hard to reach, she held me by the waist,
and I reached out farther than gravity allowed to grab handfuls for the
three of us. She would pull me in and we would collapse in hysterics. I
remember holding my sides on her kitchen floor.
I
don’t remember the number of places we called hoping to print our
outlines in color. Open note exams meant extreme organization,
labeling, and detailed notes. Colored copies of our fifty some odd
pages became an urgent requirement. Dinner became a secondary priority
as we tried to find places still open. We settled on a place downtown
and piled into the car of the only one willing to drive in the light
snow. It never occurred to us to change out of our sweatpants or brush
our hair. I’m not sure if we had even showered that day.
We
had a hard time finding parking. The holiday lights strung above the
streets reminded us of the festivities that we were missing again this
year. The snow smeared on the windshield made it hard to see. We
climbed out of the car with heavy feet. December wind ripped through
our sweatpants. We trudged by a restaurant window filled with cheery
faces and couples holding hands under pretty white-light chandeliers. I
realized it was Saturday night and begrudged them their free time and
dinners and love. My reflection in the window fell over their cheer.
My eyes vacant, my mouth taught, messy hair, sweatpants too big tucked
into heavy snow boots. I put my head down and kept walking. I didn’t
need to see any of that.
When we got to the store, it
was closed. Lights off, door locked. Of course! It was Saturday
night! We had lost our days weeks ago, forgotten that the world still
ordered itself around times for work and times for rest. We stood there
and looked at one another in silence. She checked her phone for the
time - we could get to the next place if we hurried. “Run!” someone
shouted, it could have been any of us. We ran.
A jog
at first, but the we picked up the pace together until we reached a
sprint. I don’t know who let out the first screech, but I felt its
release. We turned our faces up to the snow and squealed and screeched
and clamoured down the sidewalk. Belly laughs erupted and the peaks and
valleys of our squeals turned into sustained screaming with bursts of
laughter. We ran by the restaurant window and the diners turned to
watch. This time I saw our reflections in a flash: my smile and our
eyes lit up in the street lights and the falling snowflakes. Sheer
joy. For this moment, I knew the better deal was on our side of the
window.
