Princeton’s campus is insulated from the dangers of a city. It teems with P-Safe cars. But for much of the community, in the privacy of our dorm rooms and our own mattresses, it is not safe.
There is a stain on our wall in Wilson and we haven’t spoken about it for a few days, my roommate and I. Streaked and coarse, a stain ground into the whitewash like graphite. It’s not visible if you don’t look for it, not something Building Services would fine us for. A stain, the length of two bobby pins held end to end. The diameter of a champagne grape. It doesn’t come out with Windex or Seventh Generation dish soap or OxiClean, left instead as a perpetual effigy of my fury and my guilt.
It was the first night without my parents in some hotel on US Route 1. I was alone and somewhere near East Pyne, brimming with the feeling of being lost and alone in a new city, juggling the oversized, color-coded freshman orientation specialty map that a volunteer organizer had gravely slipped into my purse.
The dining hall lurches with athletes. You sit down next to your friend’s maybe-roommate and she looks down at her own plate. “Wow,” she says, “you’re eating so little.”
Did something happen again? she asks. She sounds concerned and I don’t want to make her concerned. Also I really don’t know how to answer her question.
Shall hold a life like a cupped palm, lash in the ocean. It knows the best exoskeletons protect the glass self sleeping inside. How to define oneself as a self that is only itself without the self it … Read More
