Towards the last few days of January, that coldest winter I have yet to live through, the professor organized for our class to go on a sketching trip. It was quite unconventional. We had a vague itinerary and a note to bring thicker jackets because of the cold.
Instead of visiting an architectural staple, he took us to unrelated places. We visited a synagogue that had stopped all services and just operated as a place to celebrate weddings or hold funerals. Then to a roof garden. And to see a very old rusty bridge. I asked him why these places and what were we supposed to sketch. He just said, ‘whatever makes you feel something.’
It was 7 in the morning, and the entire class met outside the Architecture building in all the wonderful layers of scarves and thick jackets. While waiting for the bus, I saw a group of girls smoking cigarettes and I desperately wanted one, but I never asked. The rest of the class finally came, and we got on the bus in morning silence.
I sat next to my friend Melanie who was on the phone with her boyfriend, and we traveled across the winter morning towards our first stop.
In the meantime, I tried to see how everyone settled into a long road trip. In front of me, Will was watching a Marvel movie on his phone, but he drifted to sleep almost immediately. Next to him, Sam was reading a mystery novel. I asked him about it. He said it was only okay. The girl in front of him was reading One Hundred Years of Solitude. The professor was talking to the bus driver about the terrible cold and how Christmas went by fast.
I scrolled through the library on my phone and saw that I’d downloaded The Anthropocene Reviewed by John Green. I had the physical copy back in my living room, but I never got around to it. There was always something else to read. With more hours to kill, I started reading it. Maybe it was the frosted windows, or my shivering jaw, but I have felt more when reading that book than all Christmas's combined. I finished that book during the trip, on our way to and from campus.
Amongst many other chapters of this book, the one titled ‘New Partner’ really made me think a lot. John Green goes to describe how a lot of points in his life with his wife have all been witnessed by this song. Listening to it, sends him to variations of himself and how much dearer the song gets each time. I cannot recommend that book enough, but that chapter was among my favorite ones.
My ‘New Partner’ is the song by Joni Mitchell, River.
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