While the new semester is not to start for yet another while, it already casts its shadows: new students moving into the flats, wandering across campus aimlessly, standing at the supermarket checkout buying prosecco, Jägermeister, beer and frozen pizza to celebrate the beginning of this new, exciting phase in their lives.
How different it feels, eleven years later, at the other end of that particular tunnel. No longer one of the bright-eyed and bushy-tailed masses, but one who will part them effortlessly by December, as their instincts tell them: he doesn't carry a coat, he must have an office, he must be staff. And staff I am, a position of good security and rather moderate pay, the limited contract I took on as a breather after my degree un-limited to a permanent position.
Sometimes, in retrospect, that student life seems so much more desirable than the one I have now. But then, it is as much their life that seems this way: a life that runs a more conventional course, that is undisturbed by the very binary approach to drug abuse both recreational and non- that is the best thing I can manage, a social life that is not routinely thrown out of kilter by fits of depression, not to mention the occasional breakdown and suicide attempt.
If one were to look at the blue notepad on the top shelf next to my graduation yearbook, one might find: "we all prefer the problems of the past to the problems of the present: existance of the latter proves the solvability of the former". A sentiment I still agree with, and one I'd rather push than any claim that "it gets better" and the world is about to turn into pink bunny fluff because one is entitled to it. It is not some unspecifiable "it" that improves by the human sacrifice we make at its altar, it is ourselves. As much as I have renounced the faith of docile servitude, it is the theological concept of adversary (Anfechtung) that resonates in me on this.
But I digress, and I shall steer away from such melancholy musings. The hubbub of students will recommence soon outside my office, and I might feel the occasional abstract twitch. Naturally, I am coming into an age where this is rather ridiculous: beside any socio-legal issues, all parties involved would feel rather awkwardly silly about this. Maybe, the blackness of a golden age is dawning [if Goethe is allowed "green is the golden tree of life", I can have a dawn into golden blackness if I bloody well please], the urge for companionship, so messily tangled into sexuality, finally firmly put back into its cardboard box, neatly shelved and stencilled.
There's classical music on the radio, only interrupted by bursts of static from the thunderstorm outside -- another upside of AM radio over the technical sterility of digital music transmission --, Beethoven's Pastorale, linked in my mind to deer prancing across green meadows in the death scene of Soylent Green.
Don't worry about that, that was just a freak event that fit too well to omit. And don't worry about me, I'm fine. Even when I'm not fine, I am. Decades of depression have trained me for a lifetime of it. Trust me, I'm a professional.