false spring

Gloom is a cloud that settles here. At dusk, the streets grow deserted. There is a hollowness in the clammy air. Everywhere the touch of cold fingers—death. The false spring titillates the temperature and things begin to melt. Everything melts too soon and the ground turns to ooze, to mud, to muck. The naked little trees seem to sink into it. The false spring teases us. Soon it will go away. Soon it will turn back. There is no way to escape it. Not within the cold stone walls of the palaces of this tragic kingdom that we call the University of Chicago.

The gloom is all-pervasive. It is ubiquitous in the puddles, in the clouds, in the invisible miasma that chokes out life—the academic atmosphere. There is only cold. There is only gloom. There is only death. The wrought iron, the gargoyles, the buttresses and spikes—they are all symbols of death. We are being scorched in the flames of the Phoenix until we turn Maroon.

©2000 Tiffany Gholar

I was having a bad day. And once again, the weather was annoying me.