Empty City

 

By: Connor Lenahan

This weekend marks the time for just about everyone to come back to Boston University after a month away. Well, most had a month away. I had ten days. I’ve been back in Boston since December 30th. There has yet to be a day in 2015 that I have not spent in the city. This is great – I love Boston – but also weird.

One of the most frequent questions I have gotten after spending a summer and, essentially, a winter in Boston has been “How is campus?”

Dead. That’s how it is. There is no one here. It’s actually a bit eerie. For a campus that runs on one street there is far too much space for me to move. Traffic isn’t just possible, it’s almost law. I am used to being able to barely move on the sidewalks while 500,000 other students move by. Now? Now I could do a zig zag across the sidewalk for two straight miles and no one would be able to stop me. That’s because BU isn’t right without people here.

It actually is a bit draining. The school isn’t quite right. I’m not quite right either. When it’s hitting single-digit temperatures and I have nothing else to do I have a built in excuse to stay inside and do nothing. It gets boring. But after a while it’s fairly depressing. You just want to be back with your friends. I love spending time up here, but there’s also a limit to how much time I can spend totally alone before my brain gets a bit loopy.

This isn’t meant to bring concern, but more to observe something true about having all the time in the world. Where I live has me situated in a room with seven other people. To have that gargantuan space totally to myself is odd. To have it for weeks at a time is crazy. This is how I find myself watching four full seasons of Archer within a week. Had Archer Vice made Netflix yet that number would have climbed to five.

Tomorrow especially will be great. Everyone I live with, save for one, will be back in our room. It will be crazy, but it will be right. It’s fun to have people to interact with. Plus class and work gives everyone a reason to do things with their day. I mean, there’s just a limit to how long you can go with watching television and playing video games. They get all the sweeter when you have other things to do. I like being busy. It’s necessary.

I don’t want to be in an empty city any more. Time to get things back to how they’re supposed to be.