Most beautiful luminescence

Taylor Grasdalen goes on a walk and thinks about some things.

It is six in the morning. Morningside Heights is sleeping, but there are to see massive and stretched bags of trash on the streets, taxi drivers falling asleep at their wheels, winter citrus rolling from its display at Westside Market. It’s very beautiful at six in the morning.

This mild weather and this dark sky make me want to work. It is December and it’s the last week of fall semester classes, and there is so much to do. Instead of working — as productive as the dearth of passersby so early makes me feel — I walk north to 116th Street and enter Barnard’s campus. Nothing is open to me but Butler Library, I think, and I can’t really yet justify going there.

I enter Barnard Hall, take the stairs, second floor, opening the one door in the building that I must have never tried. It’s to the running track. I’ve come here before maybe three times. The center of the room holds LeFrak Gymnasium, the track elevated well above it like a moody halo. There is barrier made up here by geometric black iron fence against the space. The track itself is dark and solid, and the lighting is filtered, the lights are off; the windows that overlook Claremont Avenue compose most of the far wall, and they are long and open.

It’s not even half past six but I’m motivated by those windows’ weird light and this hardwearing ground. This reminds me of the walks I take along Riverside, which is now too cold to stand for longer than an hour. I sit against the wall, below a small green bulletin board, and take from my bag some reading for some class. I highlight it, almost all of it. I both highlight and underline the sentence that reads: “Such writing is commonly called tendentious.”

I do see the sun rise from here. I’ve taken forty-odd minutes to read thirty pages. I should’ve gone to Butler this morning, maybe, maybe I should start going to Butler again. Before final exams set in. But I like the weirdness of this running track and the walk I take to some place new and the feeling I get when I read about something I didn’t prior understand in a place I didn’t used to know.