oh, cambridge
all the same, over a dozen people have committed suicide off this belltower. it's the tallest point for miles, looming solemnly over the town, rimmed in by the flatness of land and the bowl of sky, impassively reducing cambridge to its true toy-like dimensions ...
I think of one of these students, crawling over the parapets to stand tall in the crisp night air -- for of course it is nighttime, when the world is at its most stoic -- staring down at the town: the college lawn all silvered and strangely pale, the moonlight gathered in luminous pools amidst the purple shadows. I wonder if they close their eyes as they fall forward; if they are crying, if they are numb. I wonder if the heavy world began to leave them the second they stepped off the parapet, peeling away in strips of discarded anxiety, as they plunge towards the blessed, silvery oblivion and their peace. I wonder if they regretted; if they desired; if they wavered in momentary indecision -- I wonder, with some strange unwarranted sense of culpability, how much it would have taken to save them.
in the exam term, the door to the belltower is locked, and the key carefully secreted away. oh, cambridge.