A Happy Day on Reflection

Life being lived

Walking around campus, quad after quad, I followed a beanie-capped Lea. The collar of her snug jacket covered her lips, but I sensed them quiver when we aimlessly dotted through buildings. She told me her life was spent here, and I nodded.

The sunshine was soft in the afternoon, and the melting ice patches scattered next to trees and plots of frozen land glistened like an outdoor disco ball. Like daytime stars. Architecture here, claimed Lea, inspired many great minds; an "inspiration deriving from something human, and because of this derivation, something that was not to bear reality, something truly out of this world." And indeed, the architecture of different school buildings felt simultaneously human and foreign. Yet it seemed strange, maybe iconoclastic and reaffirming to the religious, that applied human creativity, or rather, products that arose from human genius, inspiration, were not a natural consequence of this world; that, in a sense, humans and their creations did not belong in the world; that proof of our existence was only proof of our alien nature.

Birds casted their wings in flight from tree to pole, pole to tree, as the wind rushed through the crevices of rock and building.

The temperature noticeably dropped, so we hurried into a library with stuffy, warm reading rooms, and a disjointed commercial café at the front. We passed students, some scribbling on paper and others staring at screens, and countless tables and chairs to eventually wander down a hall threaded with displays of student projects.

I watched Lea press forward, observing the objects in glass cases like clothes behind shop windows. She wore jeans that were cut from her high boots, a cheap necklace that hung beneath her blouse, and waterproof mascara.

Lea was different, foreign, and she knew she was, and therefore, maybe her analyses were more a reflection of her personality than a reflection of the case. She was convinced that humans were exotic; that my dull life was novel; that existing as we do was purely distinct from our relevance to the universe; that we were distortions of reality, of space-time; that this distinction, maybe, made a difference between how life can be lived and how life was being lived.