06.23.2004 - 2:36 p.m.

It is raining warm, well-spaced drops today, warm enough to walk without covering, light enough to dry at every stop. I am fetching things from the old half of campus, I am greeting the people I know on the path, and I see no-one who is not familiar for one reason or another. It is raining the smell of new grass and pavement, it is raining to begin new things.

I stop at one of the three oldest buildings, the one with offices on the bottom and oddly-shaped dorm rooms in the upper floors. I remember the unrelenting humidity and cardboard smell of this building. I remember entering hot, sweaty, and covered in river brine to shower in borrowed flipflops before my next class, the moths that always came in off the balcony, the walks through hallways of locked offices to the last fifty-cent coke machine on campus, the dense sorrow in certain rooms.

It wasn�t even my dorm.

Today I head towards an office I�ve never remarked on, like a visitor, by looking up the room number on the plaque in the entranceway. I exchange a few words with a secretary and am handed a soft manila packet. I walk back out into the almost-rain, an accomplished bounce in my step. This envelope contains my new contract. It is the next year of me, and this time, I know exactly what I want to remember.

-stonebridge

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