Little grey hallway with no doors, just a room at the end and a window letting in light so brilliantly there’s really nothing at all to be seen. Baseboards are scarred from the multiple armchairs slugged down and back up from all the years’ moves; iterated velvet so gentle but each wooden leg barbed by shocking ability to bruise the environmental walls.
I think of springtime at UBC. The flitting neon green light of efflorescent fauna against a backdrop of concrete, concrete, glass. I think of the yellowness of trodden fields between cafe and dormitory; the inevitable impact of coffee on structure. A lot of fear in the tessellating negative space under rustled trees, if you felt you could stop to rest even at all. A lot of fear but that spring in step, that stretch of limbs, the gratitude of muscle fibre for having been exerted. And then of course the sideways-sliding self doubt that reworks the syllabi to achieve pernicious discontent, no matter how popsicle-blue that sky. So fuck it, let the fall semester do its worst, but there’s little else to do today but bare shoulders and clavicle, incur later-in-life joint damage in drugstore flipflops, hope April’s last winds hold sympathy. The carefree beach, it calls. Hot good sand upon arrival, a first texture to remind sallow brains of otherworldly bliss (mountains far and wide crumbled each to send themselves to us, by sea), but bisecting the scene ear to ear is that water so heartless and beguiling (pitching out onto the rocks, spraying siren song through lascivious teeth). No one ever called it hypnosis but how was it anything else? It was me and I stood right on the stitches of that seam, I saw the oceanic peril to the west, and opposite, the great uphill through Pacific Sprit, and what I chose to do was walk straight on, never teeter, never commit, return at nothing less than the phonograph’s revival of a play-school bell. It fired precisely when I forgot how tiring it all was, and then all the fretting about choice’s lust was rebooted. Patched in were new pathways, new notational schema, the cozy plaid drop cloth of decaying leaves to soundproof all the many footsteps attached to different people. Coffee, still, a surviving remnant between epochs.
There might be something to be said about determining the pitifulness of your life by your most frequent coffee order. In school I drank far too much Ethical Bean and nameless drip from the conglomerate cafes across campus, but I could still claim this shiny piece of privilege (my meal card) which (paid for by my mom) afforded me one (minimum) daily hazelnut latte from Starbucks. This was a treat, or maybe this was childhood and I was slow to learn what failing a class does to one’s morale, what physiological havoc three allnighters in a week can inflict. I was young. And then you complete your first year and you’re moved one more step up towards the goal of all goals, despite how nauseous you still feel about the whole process – recycling all your purposeless papers, is this a good idea? Passing seems more like the default, as if there’s some administrative spectre who’s had to pull up your file and spend max five seconds thinking of a good reason not to let you come back, and probably they said “I got nothing” and now you’re refreshing your browser at 2pm on a Tuesday in July so you can sign up for classes with scant descriptions and for professors with hopefully a chili pepper. This at year one.
Second year: a lot of instant batons of watery homemade coffee, hauled to morning classes in my prized 20oz tumbler. Less incentive to spend actual money on steamed milk, but insistence on the occasional entitlement to such pleasures, which meant microwaving skim milk in my shared kitchen, articulating delicately with the spoon so as not to wake the roommates. All the while experiencing a devastation of self-awareness re: intellectual stamina, fitness for the learning curve.
Third. I just remember I was “satisfied” with waiting twenty minutes at Tim Hortons for a small coffee, one cream, one sweetener. I do not know what brand of sweetener was used. Let us all forget this spell.
In my fourth and fifth years, I grew wise (I think I can say so now). I found work at a third wave cafe. I thought about espresso extraction. Suddenly Starbucks could not satiate; it was not for me, no matter its population on campus. Now there were places beyond the perforated borders of university that seemed worth experiencing, worth riding a certain bus forty minutes to taste. There was a newfound comfort in these explorations – most often solo – during hours so dearly fond of morning that hardly anyone else crossed my path. There was a life more broad, more expansive than the one I’d dreamed up, even when I’d figured I could guess at the most lenient and limber a mind could be and had set out to sear on that explicit endeavour my own monogram. I hadn’t realized the gift of cafes that served to not solely students, and I hadn’t appreciated that there might be people proud and elegant enough to stand staunchly behind their bars, devoid of terminal illusion. Such a foreign concept, in a way, at that time: that someone might be drawn to creative vocation the way many more knowable faces are drawn to their intellectual staircases. No one ever called that hypnosis but how was it anything else? To think for any moment ever during your four-plus years at school that the entirety of your worth was correlated to your academic standing, to your acknowledgement by professors, to the bylines baring your surname and inconsequential first initial. What irreverence to humanity. But even if I felt it like an itch, I couldn’t name it, the discomfort of being judged routinely by faces blown thin and brains paled, for the sake of erudite purity. Persistence. Proliferation, and not personality. How to then go on in your city, ordering drip you don’t care what variety coffee to make it into the lab shift that’s running you dry, that’s exciting you deeply, that’s seeing you pluck the crania of several mice from their respective thoraces (as an example). Here I speak for the souls unlike me, so valuable in their conquest of knowledge. A little vestigial nodule of me still has hopes that I’ll end up on a path of such glory. Hail to those that sacrifice, that swear feilty to their chosen journals. Listen, if I’d had half the nobility, I’d be branding my martyrdom through every PLOS entry from 2010 to present. Fuck the flesh of me, the personal brain connected to heart-shaped eyeballs; I am merely the embodiment of science, the pursuit of understanding, and be reckoned with I shall not. Or but actually whatever, there was more meaning in the sludge ghosting around my numerous empty coffee cups than there ever was in my crack at the big university world. My singular attempt at post-secondary bliss vs. the semi-daily reverence to a craft that insisted, when all others slept, that I would be awake.
And come September: reappear changed but not exactly. The waves, though peripheral, still lap with their shared incessant tongue, seeking to draw out the most impassioned or the most disparaging; thirsty for either. The towering institution of school, with some ingenious and proprietary and self-aggrandizing technology, boards up the water to uphold Quiet Hours. Steady are the strides but vapid is my headspace, zipped tight to the sheer greenness of arboreal fringe along colloquial paths. Self-awareness seems to bloom in the off-season, as the thousands of us emerge freshly turned by salted waters, newly acquainted with demise. Bad things in the brain here; at least there’s something sweet to be observed for every word typed, maybe even for each retyped. Abundant loveliness that could never be held up with both palms like an offering, like a thing any of us could have owned so as to give away. None of this is or was ours. It’s more like, to be folded into the duvet before a big nap, to experience exponential decay of personal thoughts and hazy twilight whisking frothy all ocular perception, but a value washes into the unknown. And spring happens again and again, chasing itself through cloud and gloom. The light will refract as it always has, splintering itself into millionths upon every stunning infliction of foliage on the mall. Between scholastic pillars will hang pleasure’s sap, crystallized by underuse and sunlight. Joy that springs from the unnamed fissure, the one unclaimed by faculty, is decreed a useless indulgence. Preferable to erode the mind with intention, carving a thriving culvert from cognitive clay. Scraps never meant for the kiln will stay behind and soften like acorns beneath those trees of archaic import. If a unique notion comes from the effort it will be its own kind of true.
Now, blessed with the generosity of time, that light in the room may be a thoroughfare to heaven. Only touch can satisfy the hypotheses, where there is abundance yet so much space to cushion. Sandpaper on an edge of fabric, metal bolts pierced to the underbellies of shelves. Rearrangements are made very often but it’s unclear what purpose proprioception serves. In a space so modular. Through a tunnel so grey, and it really always has been that colour.