September books: 1/5 (Ruin and Rising)
Silly me is now in the middle of four books (one romance novel, one horror novel, one silly TV-show tie-in, and a mythology book from England). You would think I would learn.
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Hooray for plot! I also managed to find exactly enough more purple cards for this section.
Wed. night my spouse and I went to an alumni panel for our engineering fraternity. It was in the engineering building on campus, which is a sprawling, mazelike monstrosity. There’s a central eight-story tower and then it just radiates out from there. Our theory is that they just build more as necessary. (There was a whole new wing where there was definitely a wall and windows when I was there.)
Squiders, I lived in this building for four and a half years. I don’t know how other majors work, but as an engineering major, there were always classes, office hours, projects, meetings, study groups, etc., all just inconveniently spaced enough that it wasn’t worth it to go anywhere else. I had a key that would let me in any exterior door in the entire building. (I don’t remember why or where I got this key. Was it from my time in engineering student government? Was it because the fraternity had an office on the second floor? The details are lost to the haze of memory.) I used to shower in the secret bathroom in the first basement after crew practice, and I explored the building for fun. I made scavenger hunts for the fraternity (“Find the secret staircase between the 7th and 8th floors.” “Find the entrance to the catacombs in the second basement in the electrical engineering wing.”)
My point is that I was intimately familiar with this building. For years I explored every nook and cranny.
You see in fiction where someone goes back to someplace they knew and it all comes back to them. I call bullshit.
Now, to be fair, the engineering center was familiar. The hallways still look the same. The classrooms still look the same. The labs and the staircases and even the lobby for the most part (they moved the coffee shop).
But navigating? Hoo boy. I mean, as I said before, the building is a maze, added on to due to necessity and not forethought, and the numbering system for the classrooms is haphazard at best. There’s three dozen staircases and none of them are in the same place section to section or even floor to floor.
But to be in a building you knew so well, that looks similar and familiar (if you ignore the giant new wing that doesn’t match anything else), and have only a vague sense of where you are and where you’re supposed to be going…well.
Memory fades. Places change. You change.
Nothing is ever, truly, the same.
(Also, after I got home I realized that the kids we were talking to were mostly born after I graduated from college. In my head I’m eternally 28 so this always throws me for a loop.)
Had a place you revisited, squider? What was the experience like?
