Mural

Twelfth Squared

I am what I am, human, flesh, blood and spirit. Among others just the same, I walk my day to day life form bed to class and back again never forgetting that as a student I am expected to forget all good manners once in a while and free body and soul from the oppression of books and empty pages.

Empty pages as the one beneath my pen, gleaming white against my desk. It rests in wait of its filling, resolved to its’ fate. By tomorrow morning it will have to be darkened. With what? I have some sort of a hint yes… but no. Let’s not break rules right from the start, learn what is accepted and what cannot be, test limits and ascertain the whereabouts of boundaries and lines not to be crossed. After all we’ve only been here a month. That’s thirty days more or less. Imagine what lays hidden ahead… I did :

Take what has already come about in the past twelfth of a year.

Multiply it by twenty four,

for the sake of precision take off four months of holidays,

then add a twelfth squared so as not to forget that some months will be particularly eventful.

There. You have it. That’s what’s waiting for us lurking away in the obscurity of our future, behind rain and snow, within the walls of Poitiers, walking the streets in our shadows prepared. Fear however should not burden us on our journey to the other side, the after Poitiers, the life we’ve imagined ourselves living in a couple of years just as we contemplated our arrival in the medieval town some months ago. We were full of expectancies, dreams and apprehensions as to our first steps off the train onto the platform, launching ourselves into open waters. Did we not guess what our day to day life would resemble? At some point we saw ourselves surrounded by imaginary faces laughing at something just as fictitious, did we not?

I drew my pen away from the tortured page and sat back, staring at my apartment; its unoriginal white walls, the bed breaking the monochrome paleness with its grey untamed covers. Covers calling me to their warm arms for me to rest unperturbed by the mountain of work starting to accumulate on my scandalously red desk. Tomorrow it will see me once more arise from the depths of night and go off for another day rocked into dreams by the incessant humming of professors. In moments such as these I would look around at those about, scrying their faces for signs of what was to come. As time will pursue its advance things will change, friends made and friends lost, moments lived to be remembered  tomorrow in cliché moments of nostalgia for the years gone.

At present it has begun. Groups are emerging and antagonisms arise faintly disrupting our sectarian community. We loosen our self imposed bounds, we get closer, intimacy settles revealing untold stories and showing weaknesses for others to help compensate. Ties are created and affections grow. That’s how it works. We’re human, bound to mistakes and dependent of others. We’re in Poitiers, in Sc po.  We will live things to be eternally remembered and sometimes regretted… This is the start. Ready for it? Neither am I.