These Days

 

 

04/02/80

 

 

 I find myself clutching this time in my life, holding these days close to me like a child clutching candy to his chest.

 I seem to be saving them for some future time when I will need to look back on them for inspiration, or encouragement, the way other people look back at high school. It feels perfect, this moment suspended from the real world, lacking the sense of slavery my time earning a living in the 1970s gave me.

 Sometimes, I sit on the concrete steps before the student center and study all the other people, the come and go of them, the chatter of them, the hurried sense of important deeds to be done.

 One woman (no older than 19) struggles to decide some major issue in her social life, yapping at her girlfriend in a stream of invectives. A man stumbles along passed them, wearing the stupid smile I've always associated with people in love, the confused smile, the somewhat vacant smile, both he and the women passing through the supermarket-style electric doors into the student center without my becoming aware of their problems resolved.

 These days seem an investment to me, a time when I am supposed to collect impressions, writing them down in my journals, keeping track of what happened to whom. I know I cannot be complete in my survey. Some people I see not enough, and even those who I see regularly, I have little inside information about, except for how they portray themselves publicly. I see sad men. I see happy women. I see one man drinking a can of beer near the stair that goes to the side ramp along the windows of the student center store. I see another man, leaning against the wall, he staring at women's chests as they pass. I see two lovers, nestled into a corner of the building, giggling, teasing each other, she putting her fingers on his lips to silence him.

 I see a million things in this moment, but cannot write them all, even though I think I have to.