To Home

The professor calls the class to closure. I begin to lift my bag over my shoulder when I hear a wimpy drop of a book and turn my head, then quickly turn back as not to call attention to my attention. Now time to just slip behind the crowd on the way out. I glide horizontally across the classroom and make my way out when a girl, from a middle row, I always sit in the front, turns to meet my path. I walk up as she walks down. Our eyes meet and we both smile. A sweet smile somewhat unsure but also this immense happiness arose from those lips. I smile back a smile I hope she appreciated. This moment last only a split second, face to face, back to back, like that, pass each other. And so we create the past in moments like this, that soon I will forget, I know it, for thirty years I will forget. For the next thirty it will be all I remember.
A swift smile for half-a-second, just like that.
I am not dressed adequately for the cold, a thin button up and a light jacket. The college lights at night dream yellow thoughts emanating across the yard, lying against passerby faces dreary and awake for a few hours more. And when they sleep, the students, they will dream of moments of undiscovered colors and unbelievable hours, all in unlivable experiences. I finally reach my car; I am cold and alone. I parked far from everyone else. It was a long walk and I am cold.
The drive home was simple memory repeating like every Monday night. There were no accidents, no mysterious events, no odd quirks, no, just the light reflecting off the road in gravel patterns, obscuring the horizon the bridge builds as it lifts over the highway to mark a way home. I never know what lies on the other side, or if I will continue to rise into the sky. Never will I cease wondering, but what memory taught me is that after a rise there is a fall. And that fall can put you at the same elevation as before or even lower. That these elevations of roads or streets, the old high bridge street, are just feelings, feelings we feel like vertigo or gravity, some mental/emotional and some more scientifically based. I learned that all we end up doing is looking up or looking down, walking up or walking down. But again we believe these binary actions because for some reason we feel we must delineate binary values, up and down, right and left, good and evil. I learned that a smiling girl who smiles at you isn’t something you should miss.
And on the other side of the bridge I dip and see a flood of lights, red and yellow, I know of which all belong to people. And before me a sea of people rises. Rise and fall. Rise and fall. Waves tumbling towards home. A nationless flag waives over my house. A distance begets a distance, a distance between houses colored yellow, tan, and reddish brown, near which I find friends sitting on compasses spinning their boundaries around their homes, marking territories of who they are in terraced obtuse angles all from a center they call home, makes them who they are, four walls and a roof defines them and the grass that reaches out yard touching yard, a fighting ring where only they struggle, a home. I don’t think of home when I think anymore.
I want to sleep now. See you sometime later. I hope whatever your bed may be in, wherever it may be, may it be warm. Dream an experience not a memory. Live in the fluorescent cloud of nothing and something where maybe happens to be always, stones turn soft, and flightless birds collect dust.
And for just a few moments, just like that we sleep.