Back in the home of the brave, things are fun so far. Today was disgusting, but the freezing rain was falling on a sunburn, so I won’t complain too much.

Ithaca has been a pretty sweaty place recently in a few ways. Finals loom, and my senior friends are drowned in projects. I’m inconvenienced by it myself, in that I’m not very good at figuring out things to do alone and people don’t have much time to entertain me. Saturday was an exception, another party in the chamber of D.O.O.M., this one in honour of hors d’oeuvres. As the hour approached, Eve and the crew took an absolutely unfeasible break from their schoolwork to make bread and cheesecake-stuffed strawberries and bruschetta.

Angela is a mutual friend of Eve and me who tends to arrive early to these affairs to help with the setup. This was the first time I’d seen her on this visit, so there was the usual amount of hugs and yelling. Beyond the usual was a series of expressive eyebrow movements and upward-inflected grunts, giving me my secondary job at the party: Angela’s wingman. Primary job, as always, was comic relief. Angela is an excellent wingperson, sort of a Top Gun character. My exploits at this party, on the other hand, included:

• Loudly plotting a way to approach a group of people, three feet from that group
• Waggling my eyebrows at Angela on hearing that a certain fellow was single, with said fellow looking directly at me
• Slinking away from this destroyed conversation and leaving Angela to resolve the situation

Somehow I maintain a fairly solid group of friends in Ithaca. I think it’s because Canadians are considered cool by default here.

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Sunday was the first real summery day of the year, and everyone on campus was out on the quad. There was a group of slackline walkers that my friend Tay and I were happy enough to sit and watch.

“You know,” I said to Tay, “it’s kind of the endgame around here these days, isn’t it?”

She wasn’t sure what I was talking about. That made sense, because really I was talking about myself the night prior, but also something more that I felt and couldn’t really put my finger on.

“I mean, you can burn whatever bridges you want. What’s left, 40 days? And then it’s all over anyway. You don’t have to be nice to people you don’t like anymore. You can say whatever you want. The future isn’t coming.”

Tay was unconvinced and probably didn’t really care what I was talking about. I was unconvinced myself, knowing that I hadn’t really gotten to the core of what I was trying to say.

“Endgame,” I said.

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Later that evening, with my sunburn established and barbecue in my stomach, some of us young punks were playing catch out on the yard of Hudson Heights. The moon was low in the sky in the way that people tell me doesn’t actually make it any bigger, and it’s just an illusion, but it was huge and I don’t believe them. The kind of wind that only blows on summer evenings blew. Angela and I took a moment to look at the moon. I thought about the party, and the slackliners, and how absurdly much I like to play catch. I thought about the way the moon wouldn’t be so low tomorrow, would just be another moon, and the only thing we could do was be outside and remember to look at it while it was there. Another future that wasn’t coming.

Endgame, I thought.

I didn’t say it out loud, because that would have been weird.