I see London; I see France; I see a pair of old, faded blue-and-white striped boxers peeking out of some pure-math-super-nerd’s sweatpants, as he reaches even higher on the whiteboard, working on a problem that probably takes more patience than I am willing to expend writing about it. It’s midnight at the library, the very best time for people-watching.
It’s only with the return of the monsoon—final exams—that juvenile undergraduates spend their Sunday evenings in burrows behind their computer screens. They can be observed working during the deep hours of the night drafting essays, parsing dense reading material, and finishing dreaded p-sets. In the wild, they can also be found at vending machines and water fountain watering holes seeking sustenance.
Night owls are simple creatures. Most prefer solitude during the wee hours, donning noise-canceling headphones and hoodies to drown out the occasional echoes of group project chatter. Notable adaptations for late night studying include a mastery of fighting off sleepiness and a large supply of caffeinated beverages. In only a few weeks, they will migrate to their native habitats and finally begin their biannual hibernation. They may be students, but they are human.
The evening began the same way it always does. Two tote bags looped over my arm and a steeping milky black tea. During these dark days, time feels liminal and spendable when the sun sets before dinner. Long nights feel like a cozy blanket, Hell’s threatening damnation looming over my to-do list. As the hours draw on, I complete what simultaneously feels like a hero's journey and an absolute waste of my time. Particularly late nights usually mean I’m either writing a paper or dilly-dallying. Short study breaks send me tumbling down rabbit holes about the Dalai Lama and the Mormon migration to Utah. Clicking and typing into oblivion, I still wonder how I got tendonitis in my wrists.
I try to slide my finger down the ladder of the page to read faster, but my eyes skim the page with a mind of their own. Fatigued, the little reader’s voice inside my head decides to take five. I give up and look around the room to reunite my consciousness with my vision. The old, sterile ceiling light in the far right corner is dimmer than the others—unsatisfying. I tend to sit on the ground floor because the stacks get eerie when it’s late. There’s a great view up here, but it vanished hours ago. Now, I can only manage to make out the outline of the steeple of the first Baptist church in America. No kidding.
It’s sparse tonight. There are about a dozen other students sprinkled about, just far enough apart from one another to give everybody personal space. Between the iPads, graph paper, and intense focus, I’m holding down the fort on behalf of the humanities. My old friend Captain Underpants is still confined in a little glass cell all by his lonesome, working on problems that take up most of the greasy whiteboard. The black ink stands out against the white table and chairs around him. He needs to work on his penmanship. Or maybe I don’t know enough calculus. I can just make out a few Greek letters and the spooky derivative function. My graphing calculator and I ended our stalemate long ago with a treaty stating I’d never take statistics again.
To his left, somebody wearing a black hoodie slouches in one of those fancy ergonomic office chairs, the ones with the thin mesh that curves to the shape of your spine. I can’t see their face from here, but their all-black outfit makes them look stealthy. I watch them glance up and down up and down from their electronic pad of paper to their computer. Whatever they’re writing looks incredibly important.
All of the tables are white, shellacked with a kind of varnish that makes them shiny. It’s satisfying for those of us who appreciate smooth surfaces. It’s also easy to inspect if they’re clean. I tend to dodge the ones with fingerprints. There are stacks of printed publications in the corner, next to the bookshelf with copies of books by professors. Besides the covers, the room is a world of beige, black, and white. I’ve looked over there before, in hopes of seeing a familiar name, but they’re all about economic theory and horribly depressing things only psychopaths would want to read about in their leisure time. It always seemed to me that academia is more about advancing people’s egos than creating literature. Scratching another dog’s head so they’ll scratch yours.
Across the room, a pair sits squished on the same side of the desk. Using big black headphones to hold back her curly brownish hair, a strand hangs over her notebook like a lamp. Her back hunches into a semi-circle, a sign of the times. The boy next to her reads a book quietly, intermittently checking his phone to send texts. He looks like he’s waiting for her to finish so they can walk home together. If they’re not already dating, they will be soon.
There’s something uniquely human about being bored. That’s not to say that other mammals and animals don’t have the same capacity, but people, it seems, are experts. It’s an act of protest against one’s responsibilities to stare off into space, not a waste of time. A fleeting moment. I look back down and turn the page.
