Brownian Motion

Ambient air temperature: twenty-three point three degrees Celsius. Solar radiation is strong. Light wind in northeasterly direction, estimated three kilometers per hour.

It’s beautiful out here.

It’s probably one of the last days of the year when I can sit here and write, one of the last days before the Charles freezes over and cerulean turns to gray, before the pastoral breeze strengthens into a hail of frostbiting claws, before I’ll have to use the heavy down jacket that will hopefully arrive in the dormitory mail room before any of that happens.

Immediate surroundings: two of my closest friends, silent. One stares at a diagram of pull-down resistors, shifting his weight. The other types rhythmically, earbuds in, turned ever so slightly away.

The lawn, freshly torn up and painted over again with blankets of sod, stands stiffly uniform in spite of the geese that have already covered it in droppings. The wind sifts through the trees like sand in an hourglass. In the distance, a helicopter’s rotors drone, interrogating the air.

Ahead, the rigid ionic columns of MIT Building 2, a facade of two-storey-tall windows, beaux-arts, stately, final, unconcerned with the hurried rustle of cars along Memorial Drive. The Charles looks so peaceful from here, its shifting waves ambling by. Those shifting waves feel a lot less peaceful when you’re in a dinghy about to capsize in the middle of the river.

I hoist myself to the top of the sculpture, sun-dappled in the afternoon light. I look across at my friends, tilt my head, and smile.

For the briefest moment all is quiet. In an instant someone will shout from across the field, or a motorcycle will scream across the road, or the helicopter will circle back with its military drumbeat. But for now we sit

In solitude

Together