#ut campus

We are present at the birth of nostalgia. Ever since the creek became the space of murder, it is not the same place any more. It was a beautiful spot that I frequented, and now it has been transformed. It’s ruined. The place has changed forever. It was different.

Today a classmate said: “I walked there and I encountered the smell of decay, and then whenever I am close I keep smelling it.” The viscerality of the event is apparent in the olfactory sensation not related to any smelling object. Pure fantom.

“There is a spirit of La Llorona in Mexican folklore,” She proceeded. La Llorona, a pale apparition, a woman drowned in creek. “It’s morbid, because this is a folklore myth and now we have a reality where a young woman dies near the creek on campus.”

I don’t know about this. But the place under the bridge, on which I had an occasion to remark, listing my favorite places on campus, is somehow outside of the accessible. Since the time of the murder, I did not think about going there – it’s still blocked anyway – but today as Jena was speaking about smell, the idea of going there sort of occurred to me – in the form of the idea of not going there.

Spaces are never fully over the event that has happened there. They are haunted by the specters emerging in collective memory. The space existed before, and as such is now recollected as pristine. It belonged to the time when the world was still relatively innocent, undisrupted, undisturbed. In my imagination, a safe place, a bucolic landscape with weeds billowing in water, rich vegetation abounding, dry red fir needles. A place of seclusion; no one was ever around.

UT-Austin has a new entrance!

View Healthyhorns Nap Map in a larger map

The best napping spots on campus, as voted on by UT students. Click each location for more details. A short nap can increase your alertness, give you higher energy levels and reduce mistakes and accidents.