Baby It’s Cold Outside

And the sky is powder blue, fading to a pale whitish yellow before it hits the horizon line. Wispy clouds are greyish-purple, in the deep shadows almost blue violet, and on the undersides glowing rosy pink and maybe a little bit orange. The colors intensify every time I glance up to look at them through the common room window, adjacent to the side from which the Boston skyline is only just beginning to light up.

It’s beginning to get cold here – 43 degrees today with a low of 30 – but it doesn’t feel that bad. I’m fine in a long-sleeved t-shirt and cardigan. Acclimatization, I guess.

My eyes are tired.

If I wanted to, I could fall asleep right now on this extraordinarily comfortable sofa, with my legs up on the wooden table and my books stacked unopened near my leather-booted feet.

The sky is darker now, duller – like somebody added a tiny bit of blue-grey to the mix and turned everything into the precise shade of dusk.

Tomorrow I’ll be on the T at this time, passing over the Charles as the sun sets over the unwinding river, setting the water on fire and sharply illuminating the outstretched fingers of the trees that line its banks. I always look forward to the ride back from Dorchester. I’m usually exhausted, fretting about the amount of work I have due the next day and how my god, it’s already 5 and I have all of my classes tomorrow and finals are in two weeks and so is that event I’m supposedly planning for the LEAH Project and I really need to go to the bank and get quarters so I can do that shit-ton of laundry sitting in my closet and go to CVS to buy that jumprope and soap and go to Dowling Hall to set my paychecks in order and go to Career Services to find an internship for the summer and damn, looks like I’m not going to make it home in time to get to my recitation so I’ll have to go tomorrow, and then

“Charles MGH, doors open on your right-“

And I can just sit and breathe and smile and look out the window over the bridge and into the sunset.

There are so many experiences that I have wanted to document here that I have not been able to, but I’m going to try to write something about each of them so that I have a record. Personal history, see? I want to be able to go back and read my story and watch how all these things – Thompson Island, getting lost at Harvard, inspiring strangers on the 23 – shape me. Shape my goals. Shape how I’m getting where I’m going.

The sky is almost completely black. Not cobalt blue or grey-purple, but black, and there’s a tiny bit of orange fading into it above the trees. Boston is illuminated, like all the sleeping windows just decided to wake up and turn on the lights.

So I’ll try.

Written on November 29, 2010