After braving the last of my midterms (please explain to me why the short answer section was easy but the matching was difficult? That makes sense in precisely zero worlds) I spread out on and sank into my common room couch. Once I’d tiredly studied the courtyard and had a staring contest with a tree from my window for an inordinate amount of time, I realized that while Yale was now at least familiar to me, I had yet to explore New Haven and the surrounding area.
My friends often mentioned jogging to East Rock (at 6am!), a neighborhood with a popular park just a short shuttle ride away from campus. As my performance poetry group gathered for our annual retreat, we decided to stay in New Haven, spending more time appreciating so many of the places we bustle past during the blurred rush of midterm season.
Will I write a poem about dinosaurs? Crystals? Maybe both? Stay tuned!
Walking around East Rock with my WORD friends!
“Wait, where are we going next?”
“Well, as Nicki Minaj once said… let’s go to the beach, beach.”
“Logan, if you quote one more song, you’re canceled!”
“Why? They’re good songs.”
At a university where everyone appears to always be doing something, making beelines, and coloring in every free notch in their GCal, it was an unusual but welcome chance to do nothing — no work, for at least a few days, and not feel like I was falling into quicksand for having done it. Perusing through the Peabody museum, debating whether or not I could outrun a T-Rex or domesticate a stegosaurus, walking around parks, hiking up trails, pretending to be filming music videos during golden hour, wiggling my toes in the sand and then realizing I had no way of preventing that same sand from getting into my socks — all small but precious moments that were relieving to steep and soak in. The trees and the cliffs reminded me of shrunken forests and Rocky Mountains — like fragments of home had been hidden here in Connecticut the whole time. Taking a little time to be present in East Rock and remember that there was a world outside of campus bubble was refreshing — a small bundle of seconds that I didn’t feel self-conscious about spending on myself and with others.
