I wave hand to the psychology building, wander into a cafeteria, buy coffee. It's Saturday. A handful of young, persistent, beautiful creatures are digging into books and comps, trying to study, while the carpet is being vacuumed from both sides. I am eating a bagel, ready to leave this humming vacuum, though I am determined not to eat at the library. As a student, I ate there all the time. Broke all the rules on no lunch among books and such. I cleaned crumbs really good though - to avoid mice and other unwanted guests. However, now is different. Now I am a visitor and I am trying not to disturb existing order. My bagel is done and I stampede towards the library. The cold is slicing up all of my warm clothes. It is unusually chilly even for Colorado.
Nothing changed much here. I easily find my way to my favorite places. The library was perhaps the biggest source of happiness when I was a student here. Hidden between the stacks of books, I skyped (yahoo messenger actually) with my boyfriend, who was distanced from me, who was in a far away land of Georgia-not-the state, while I was doing my time in Boulder. It was here, in the vastness of 6 million books, amongst students looking for a quite place to study that I found about my friend getting married. It was here that I looked for shelter if I needed to sleep or get warm. I came here to save money on textbooks. Burrowed 10-20 books at a time. I took advantage of this treasure and started reading all of the authors that have won a Nobel prize in literature. Man, out of a 100 books, I remember maybe 10...
I learned how to navigate the stacks, I knew how to find a fiction book without a catalog. I had discovered that science stacks contain hidden desks and chambers of secret. In fact, I'm in such place right now, typing into my phone for a lack of comp or simple pen, overcome by my oldness, by not being a part of this anymore, by being left out, approaching 30, romanticizing youth and barely touching what once was mine. I took pics with shaking hands. I am staring outside into the snow, thinking that my whole trip to Boulder was wasted on being locked inside this building. And it brought no solace, no shelter, because it only reminded me of who I was and am not anymore. We loose our favorite places, we loose them, even if they stand unchanged, full of the same books, stacked on the same shelves, on the same floors of the same building, we're different, I'm different, for better or worse, who knows, but I no longer belong.
This whole phone typing thing is tedious. I better catch the bus back to Denver.
P.S. The pic: The very last floor of the library, hard to find, but so noiseless. Contains fiction.
