In Darkness We Dream

There's something remarkably similar in the atmosphere of the first of autumn and the last of spring. But to those living on the cycle of syllabi and semesters, August and May form a dichotomy. You see, the winterborne death holds the promise of a beginning, yet the springtime rebirth marks the end.

A cool evening last spring found me sitting on the Diag, doing nothing in particular: wondering, people-watching, breathing. Another found me there as well: a friend, stepping off his bike to share the moment beside me. His tired eyes betrayed his troubles. His friends were falling out, and he discovered himself in the middle. What's the point of investing so much into our friendships, he posed the question, if by indifference or inevitability, they escape us all the same?

I had an answer then: to cherish some moments, to see something from another's eyes, to grow as a person, and if nothing else, to scratch that atavistic itch to connect with another. We're social beings, after all. The investment itself, I believed, was the point.

A year's come and gone and now my mirror reflects his eyes that evening. Now we've reached the end of everything as we know it. It's not those loose friendships we have to mourn alone: it's the quiet Saturday morning walks, the hushed stress of cramped study halls, watching leaves fall and squirrels play, everything.

Perhaps we forage the beauty of these moments because they elude us as just that: moments. Then, to feel the loss of these moments is to have loved them. To feel the hollow of unrealized dreams is to have dreamt at all. Without darkness, we could not sleep. We could not dream.