The other day, I cut my hand in the architecture studio. I ran around the third floor of the architecture building, clutching my injured hand in the other, willing a first-aid kit to appear. I ran downstairs, out the door, my hands painting themselves red until I reached the infirmary. I’m told that I left a trail of blood as I ran—but when I returned to the studio five hours and an ER trip later, there was no evidence of it. Dotted across the floor in its place were piles like sugar of little beads of bleach, tracing a path out the door. The site of my accident had already been scrubbed. 

That’s how things go at Princeton, I think. Anything out of place warrants, generously, a glance. Nothing, not even a bleeding student running by, deserves more than a curious peek up from our laptops. And, as fast as possible, any evidence is hidden. We come to expect the perfectly manicured grounds, not once wondering how strange it is that nothing occurs here which should not. Or, rather, almost nothing happens—whenever something happens, whenever life occurs, Princeton prides itself on removing it before anyone can see it.  

One day last semester, I was leaving the library and heading home. A slightly windswept fall afternoon, the type of walk that ends with you picking out fallen leaves from your coat. As I started my walk home, I noticed someone with a guitar, perched against the wall of East Pyne, playing with a guitar case laid out in front of him. Steeped in the shadow of the arch, the musician strummed for passing students, professors, visitors. I didn’t stop to look—no one did. I felt unnerved. And as I walked, thinking about just why I had felt so put off by his appearance, a small sensation crawled up the back of my rib cage. When I returned home and changed in the mirror, I noticed a small shadow, a spiny mass, tacked onto my back, dug like scratches of static into my shoulderblade. Smoke danced in my nose, gaseous tap shoes kicking in my sinuses. I felt queasy, suddenly. Seasick. The ground I stood on no longer sure. The busker’s presence, proof of the outside world, had disrupted something deeply folded into the fibers of this campus, something impossibly knit with who I am on this campus, something that knows to reject everything not of itself, something whose only protocols are homogenize or expel. 

Since then, I’ve begun to feel slightly disturbed, certainly more so than I used to, when these flashes of the outside world get through the gates. An antennae had sprouted out of my skull, sending surges of electricity through my nerves whenever it detected an aberration. Small things—a dog walker, a campus tour, McCarter-theatre-goers—barely got a spark, but some things struck like lightning.

A few weeks back, I was waiting on the train to New York City with a friend when a woman at the station, around 30 or 40, asked if my friend could help her get an Uber home. A fairly run-of-the-mill experience, albeit a bit rare. My friend ordered the Uber and we got on the train. 

Then, just a week ago, I was sitting in Coffee Club. Just working, not drinking anything. Beside me, tucked into a seat at the table against a corner formed by a pillar against the wall, was a woman, bundled up thick in a scarf and fleece, working on some type of PowerPoint presentation for something distinctly un-Princetonian. As I worked, she turned to me and smiled. “Cold today, isn’t it?” she ventured. I laughed politely, said yes, and turned back to my work. After a few minutes, she got my attention again: “Could you help me to get a matcha?”

I took my headphones off and turned to her. I noticed, at that moment, four large paper cups lined up next to her computer, each empty. I looked closer at her face—familiar, vaguely. Immediately, I placed her as the same woman from the train stop. I felt a force behind the bridge of my nose, a surge of heat, a short-circuit spark. 

It’s one thing to have seen her at the train station, that interstitial space between campus and the outside world. Someone her age, someone presumably non-Princeton-affiliated, is largely regular at that junction of campus/off-campus. But it was strange for her to be in Coffee Club, in this space which is so distinctly of campus, of the student body, of the fibers which swallow any discrepancy whole—yet there she was. 

On my walk home, I began to see people everywhere. Not the academic-looking sort: just regular people. Some walked their dogs, others sat on benches smoking and laughing. When they saw me they stopped, looked me dead in the eye. 

Callisto Lim is transcending campus life.