I've settled it--this is my spot. It is just a blip of a walk, a microsecond away from my apartment, but its nearness has not tricked me into thinking a better spot could be found elsewhere. I sit on this bench, Italian sub half consumed, relishing the Keanu Reeves flair of my solitary, introspective meal.Rutgers is a sometimes an unappealing mishmash of architecture, the most unfortunate buildings, I think, from the sixties (Loree and Hickman Hall on Douglass being the most offensive to look at or be in). But the oldest buildings, clustered behind me, which hold the offices of the university's most important people and who knows what else (Van Nest? Winants? What is in there?), are undoubtedly the most beautiful, though not related to the average Rutgers student's experience in the least. Indoctrination to the Rutgers classroom experience is more like having a class in the freezing basement of one of the river dorms--I had roughly a billion of those. The very fact that these old beautiful buildings of Rutgers' past have nothing to do with us meager students may be part of the reason this lovely grassy area nearby goes ignored and all these benches lining the path remain empty.
Across the path I can watch that huge building next to my apartment being constructed (that stupid effing building--I look out the bedroom window and see nothing but its parking deck head-on), the church undergoing some construction, and the platform of the train station. I feel like 500 Days of Summer's Tom sitting on his bench at Angel's Knoll, thinking this is my little under-appreciated piece of the city.
I look over at the trains and think how easy it would be to get on and be home in twenty minutes, or get on and be in New York in an hour. How simple, accessible. I could even hop on and find myself at the Newark airport, and I could fly to Berlin, or anywhere else I wanted to. Who says it's so hard to pack your bags and leave home for other corners of the globe? The way out is right there... I'm not trapped... but for now, I'm still trapped.
An old woman jogs across the street, a city bus screeches annoyingly until it halts at the train station stop, a tall, slender man in a brown corduroy blazer and exaggerated clothes hanger shoulders moseys along the bench lined path with his briefcase. The sun is setting, it's cold, everything is a 5:30 pm blue.
I'm not sure why I came here to begin with, but now I guess it's time to go home.
i definitely know what & where you're talking about :)
ReplyDeletewhen i had classes over the summer, everyday i'd get off the train at about 6:45am (!) and would head to scott hall, cutting through the old campus instead of walking down the sidewalk on somerset then college ave. i loved loved loved going up that long driveway in the morning (trying to avoid the sprinklers along the brick paths at that hour :P), cutting through the couples of building to get to class and then going down the brick paths later in the afternoon to get the train home. it definitely has that secretive-special feel about it :)
@JessJess
ReplyDelete:)