although i feel completely out of place, i think i’m fitting in. my body is so filled with anxiety that i don’t even bother buying an actual coffee drink from the red door café—the last thing i need now is caffeine. i find a nice corner table and crack open my bottle of sparkling water.
it’s a gorgeous golden autumn afternoon, leaves are falling from the trees, and all the students are in weekend mode, leisurely walking and chatting, or stumbling back from their laboratories after a long day of vivisecting mice or debugging multi-threaded algorithms. it’s the most peaceful i’ve ever seen campus, and i have trouble meshing this image with my memory of my four years at caltech.
in my manpurse i brought my ipod and a book and a notepad and 6 different pens. i systematically take each item out and arrange it on my table. my heart is still kinda racing, and i have no idea why. i look out across the courtyard and take another big gulp of my fizzy water. more leaves fall, more students i don’t know stroll by.
it was the best of times, it was the worst of times is my reply [usually with a roll of the eyes and a smirk] when people dare to ask me about my years at this nerd camp. people usually assume i’m referring to the strenuous curriculum. unfortunately, quantum physics and differential equations aren’t why my heart is racing this afternoon.
it’s not just the memories of clayton [ugh], or of sam [eek], or of steve or of chris—it’s the combination of all of them. lovers lost, friends taken from me, hearts broken. i knew moving back to los angeles, eventually i’d need to revisit these demons, and this afternoon something brought me back to pasadena, to sit here and… remember.
i feel a little bit insane, giggling to myself here at this café table all by my lonesome, as i think back over all of the good times. and i feel a little bit human, looking down at my blank notepad pretending to write, when i’m really just holding back the tears as i remember the not-so-good times. heartache sucks. love sucks. death sucks. the past—in this case, at this very moment—sucks.
some amount of time [2 minutes? 20 minutes? 2 days?] go by as i watch more leaves fall, and remember more and more long-forgotten memories. there must by hundreds of subtle visual and olfactory clues here that are helping me resurrect tidbits from the archives…
sneaking around campus late at night. ditching classes. sitting on the floor of my dorm, talking. cuddling. smiling.
not understanding why it was all happening. crying in the rain. saying goodbye. not being able to say goodbye.
i hear an ahem! directly next to me and snap out of my trance. i glance over and see a smile. without me noticing, a lanky, shaggy blue-haired boy took over the table next to mine. piercing gray eyes, tank top and baggy jeans and a stack of books. his eyebrow ring glistens in the late-afternoon sun as he glances down at his homework with pursed lips.
ten minutes later he catches me staring, and smiles back, again. nonplussed, i look off into the distance as i contemplate the meaning of life, what i’m eating for dinner and if, perhaps, whether i should just leave this boy to his own devices. he taps his pencil nervously before scribbling some stuff down on his notepad, tearing off the page, crumpling it up, and leaving it in the middle of his table. as he packs his bag, stands all 6′2″ of himself up and strolls off, he brushes the shaggy blue hair from his eyes one last time as he looks back with a smile.
expecting to find a hot love lust letter, phone number, or @caltech.edu email address, i uncrumple his paper. disappointed, i instead find a geodesic equation that i can’t quite satisfy. luckily, i’ve come a bit closer to satisfying my own equation—that complex formula of my life. today i came a bit closer to solving some variables i’d long forgotten about.
