Stuart

I think I first met stuart at a frosh party. He was there, with us wild eyed new students, but he was calm. He had always been there, and would always remain. Or so it seemed to somebody so unfamilair with the terrain. I think everybody was alittle bit overwhealmed by the scene they had suddenly just been thrust into. Blocks of townhouses, named by letters and perhaps not unsignificantly recalling prisons through this recollection were our grounds that evening. Pure freedom for some, no authority but the RAs, sasheying their way around campus and turning a blind eye to underage drinking. The attraction to underage drinking is strange. Your average seventten year old hasn't really developed a palate for beer, and hastily chugs (or, in some more daring cases, funnels) beers at an alarming rate. Flavour was never the perogative, only mindless blind intoxication, and getting there at an accelrated rate only proves you are more hardcore. But honestly, what is the point? Later on that night as you sponge your own vomit off your face you can ask yourself if you're having fun, and maybe in the morning you'll put ona clean shirt, take a shower and eat a greasy fast food hamburgar in an attempt to makeyourself feel better and somehow convince yourself that yes; yes, in the end, the expeirience of the night before was amusing. To a point. APoint you can't remember.
Tell me the logic of spending twenty dollars to not remember puking on yourself. Keeping in mind that to a careful undergraduate, twenty dollars is nearly a months worth of food.
Irregardless, at this point, no lessons had been learned, and nobody really wanted to learn them. School, for that night, wasn't about learning. It was about knowing. It was about knowing the names of as many people around you as possible, so you could rebuild a social framework from the ground up - fnding new friends in a foreign land, latching on to those you thought would last. What i think everybody forgot was that this land was foreign to all of us. we were all alone (paridoxically enough) together, and not one of us had more than a few friends whom we had brought with us. Perhaps even those people were unfortunate, because they had those old friends to fall back on - perhaps they were the ones that would have no social success that evening.
But, alas, it wasn't that way. I stood there, quite alone in the crowd, talking to noone, drawing no attention to myself holding a half drained beer and no knowing where the costruction site was.
I don't even know where stuart came from. he sidled out of nowhere and stood beside me. He lifted his glass bottle to my own and introduced himself. "Stuart Dent"
"You're kidding, right?"
"Unfortunetly, no."
Other people joined the conversation, if you wanted to call it that. I was waved in the gate, and took up the barren landscape, imagining the beautiful structure of glass and steel that was waiting, just outside existence. The minds eye saw it glimmer.
Thats what stuart did. He was there, then he was gone.