OUR STUDY SPOTS: THE LIBRARY
A chill, a current, of the outside flows into the library. It clings to the people coming from the cold. Keep going ahead and there's the field of desks, positioned monotonously apart. Enough to create each person’s own space. Where one inks words and the other breaks them down from the glow of a fluorescent screen. A student scribbles and drafts onto an earthy brown journal, another goes from left to right on a matte keyboard. Each joint works together to correct every error. Backspacing all the wrong and leaning forward into typing the perfect sentence.
Take the stairs and uplift your hopes in finding your own space, where you build the body of your essay and carve it into a piece to be proud of. Ding! The scene awaits. Computers and technology enabling digital acrobatics - skimming, copying and pasting. Scraps of tabs open and torn out paragraphs pasted onto the thin skin of the screen. The urge to complete a task builds tension. Its sound is the clicking of pens and tapping of keyboards. Its scent is of caffeinated drinks. A variety, a bitter aroma of coffee, cold in insulated cups. An artificially sweet scent lingers, somewhere between energy drinks and overly sugared sweets. Meals deals at every other desk; that mixture of three somehow becomes a testament of character. More protein for the gym goer, more caffeine for the final pusher. In all the sustenance and scattered tools, the panic and the rush, the pressure of it all, there’s a kind of hope that makes me want to join them. To build something more out of something less.
There are post it notes stuck to laptop screens, corners curling from use. Half-doodles, half-reminders: ‘Submit by 11:59’, ‘Don’t forget references.’ The worn stickers on water bottles tell stories of hobbies and favorite artists. Somewhere between the buzz of fluorescent light and the quiet hum of overworked laptops, there’s a rhythm that’s constant yet unspoken. Of hundreds trying to make something count. A girl reads aloud to herself in a whisper only she can hear. A boy in a hoodie scrolls endlessly, chasing the idea he once had but somehow lost. And still, the keys tap. Still, the minds stir. Hidden beneath noise-cancelling headphones, brows furrow and then un-furrow. Paragraphs become pages and the pages begin to stack. Some lose steam and sit staring; others hit flow and don’t stop.
Moments pass unnoticed. Swallowed in the glow of screens and the shuffle of thought. Outside the windows, the world shifts, but in here it waits. This is the place where effort becomes creation.