These Days

04/02/80 I clutch this time in my life to my chest like a kid clutches candy, saving it for some as yet unimaginable future for a moment when I might need inspiration, looking back for encouragement the way other people recollect high school.For some reason, this period seems perfect, lacking the sense of blue-collar slavery I endured for most of the last decade.I sit here, on these still-cool concrete steps of the student center, pondering the people who pass, the coming and going on them, their chatter filling this arched doorway with incomprehensible echoes, people hurrying by with some urgent and important deed they need to accomplish, a decade too inexperienced to understand what they face before they reach my age, an then, missing out on some of the details that make their lives seem to special – few contemned to face a time clock or the bent back of hard labor the way I did in my alternative journey here.One woman – perhaps no older than 19 – complains about her social life, yapping at her girlfriend poodle-like, each bark thick with invectives over some boy she met in sociology.Behind her, coming from the direction of the campus library wears a grin so stupid I know immediately he is in love, his expression too vacant for him to notice any of the other pretty women moving in and out the supermarket doors that lead into and out of the student center, leaving me to wonder how either boy or girl will ever see their issues revolved, or what might become of them, or where they might be in a decade or two, and if I will ever encounter them again at some distant location in some other circumstance.I am self-consumed, banking my current reality, absorbing an investment of images that I might call upon later, jotting each brief glimpse into other people’s lives in notebooks I will consult later – a snap shot of unresolved lives that I capture only at a moment after which I lose track, and have no future snapshot to compare again – the blonde hair turning gray, the smooth face taking on wrinkles, the hopeful look satisfied or filled with despair.
Some of these people I see over and over again each time I sit here; some I even know from classes we take together or events we attend – and yet know even these are temporary, faces I think I know, but may never know again, lives through which I momentarily pass, and may not pass through again, or may hear about or glimpse at a distance as they find fame I never find, or collect fortunes to which their educations provide a key.Even the most familiar I do not know well; I have no names for them, an paint them today with the emotions I see in passing, the sad men, the happy women, the man drinking can of beer near the stair that wraps around the ramp along the windows of the student center store, or the other man, leading against the wall – staring at all the women’s chests as they pass.Two lovers nestle in the corner of the building, giggling, teasing each other with pecking kissed, she pressing the tips of her fingers against his lips to make him stop, both giggling, both falling silent, both a mystery to me as to if this might ever last.I collect them all in them all between the covers of this notebook, filling up empty pages with fragments of lives I may never encounter again.