evening

Tonight I was in the office to see the sky turning the blue that it does on overcast winter evenings. Being in an office past dark always reminds me of the late nights in the halls at MSU. Some nights the offices were full of us, on break from another long night class, or frantically working to finish up an overdue chapter of the thesis, or stealing reams of paper and boxes of cheap pens now that the department secretary was gone for the day. Or hanging out, not quite ready to go home, and maybe hoping for the mention of pints and an invite out.

Sometimes, especially in my third year--some nights it was just me, the only sound in the long hall the cleaning crew moving chairs back into tidy rows. On those nights, as I stood over the printer collecting forbidden print jobs, I could almost see our house from the window. And when I'd get there, face frozen, people would be waiting for me. It was the thing I missed the most last winter, especially on nights when the B was working late on his own campus: the coming home to something full and bright and warm.

And that's what I thought about tonight, driving and maybe listening to the same song over and over again--just me in the car, headed back to a dog, some leftover curry. And yet it was my favorite half-hour of the day: the buses filled with people, and on the radio the smooth voices of NPR telling me everything that happened in the hours I was thinking about myself. And then the spot right at the city limits where the trees fall away to show the buildings downtown, lighted and yellow, welcoming me back.