I was munching on week old pizza when Courtney walked in and we started discussing the brick painted above the chalk board and counting how it had dwindled so much in the past couple of years. There was Blaire’s from 2013 with some others, but none that we could see from 2014, and I only remember Kristina painting hers at the end of summer last year. Over the summer since May, only Joey had painted a brick.
We took a moment to take it in, and as I swallowed my last mouthful of pizza I said, “I wasn’t ready for this, and honestly, I don’t think many people are.”
She turned to me and cocked her head as if to cue some kind of clarification,
“Graduating, I mean.”
I elaborated: For one graduating, in the midst of all the work, suddenly it’s finals, then graduation the following weekend. Home beckons, and before they know it, they are swept off to their next stage in life. It all happens so fast, they never even had the time to think of a cheesy in-joke or what their brick would look like.
Courtney left shortly after.
Even those who were the closest, the people that were the most tightly knit to the SPS,
had left no mark.
Except for the strange and readily identifiable items in the back corner of the room, including a unicycle, a RipStik and some juggling pins, those attributed left nothing permanent.
Alone in the lounge, in the sobering moment, I decided to get to work.
Hence my brick. (Thank you Joe D. for the input!)
I stopped to take long breaks while painting the brick to do nothing. Aimlessly moving my thumb up and down my phone in the presence of the two old couches and recliners which have been hospitable to me so many times before. Just chilling, because I almost knew consciously, that subconsciously, I didn’t didn’t want to leave.
It wasn’t until that I put my final touches on the brick late in the evening that I started to realize that this might be the last time in a long time that I spend time in this room.
As I scrawled one last message in chalk on the SotL brick and turned off the lights, a slight heartache started to set in, comprised of some subtle mixture of joy and loss.
Till next time.
#tillnexttime #sps #physicslounge (at Osmond Lab)
