The Day That Willy Died.

Something happens when all homework
becomes instantly irrelevant.
When the whole campus seems
like a strange, silent home
in the blink of an eye.

It's not even the sadness, really,
or the mourning, though it's there...
it's the shock.
The shock of knowing I'm human,
we're human, and we're all
so very, very mortal.

We're here, spend this time on earth,
oblivious to the fact that death can strike us
anytime it wants.

It always happens when we're not thinking about it.

***

I walk across the cold, the campus covered in a thin sheen of ice, slick
as a ballroom floor.
It's night. I'm carrying a letter to deliver from Vermont to Maine, I can feel the silent swing between states as I walk.

I feel both repelled from others and yet yearning for their comfort.
I sit in a chair. I amble around commons.

I wish, when Jeremy leaned into my room to hand me a letter stamp
respectfully, with no questions asked,
I wish that he had.