Are you at Barnard, or are you… somewhere else?

A few weeks ago, Managing Editor Betsy Ladyzhets argued that the basement of Teacher’s College is a liminal space, a place that exists between one conception of reality and the next. Now, she’s back to evaluate whether another space on Columbia’s campus fits in that same category.

I am sitting in the study room on the third floor of the Diana Center, studying for an organic chemistry final.

The red chair beneath me is stiff and unyielding, the lights above me just bright enough that I don’t feel as though I’m about to doze off. The coffee in my travel mug purchased from Liz’s Place before I started this session is lukewarm, and still needs more sugar. The 3D models of cyclic compounds cluttered around my desk cubicle mock my continued confusion with their sharp edges and incomplete bonds.

I have lost track of how long I’ve been sitting in this study room. It could have been one hour, it could have been three, it could have been ten. I covered the clock on my laptop when I hid my notifications panel with a flashcard, and I am determined not to peek until I have figured out chair-chair interconversion. I’m watching the same video of my professor explaining this process for the fifth time – or maybe it’s the twentieth time – or maybe I have watched twenty different videos all indistinguishable from each other.

The girl sitting in front of me has not moved a muscle since before I arrived here. She’s taking a nap, I tell myself. She’s taking a nap. She must be taking a nap.

My body feels suddenly weightless, as though I am melting into the stiff red chair, skin and bones twisting into plastic and steel. I keep repeating this organic process, turning my model back and forth, move carbon one up and carbon four down, but the more I move it, the more it becomes hazy – ominous – a self-creating tarot card spelling out future unavoidable doom.

Maybe I just need to go to the bathroom. I stand up, tiptoe across the study room, and head into the hallway. The hallways are dim, a light flickering somewhere from the computer lab at one end of the floor. I catch a glimpse of a shadow in the stairwell – some girl calling her mother, perhaps, or a ghost stalking the building in the hopes that someone will drop an unopened bag of potato chips. I think it’s raining outside. That, or it’s an alien invasion. I can never be sure.

The thing about the Diana Center is that it’s all windows – windows to the cafe downstairs, windows to the seminar rooms occupied by squatting study groups, windows to the campus turned construction site haunted by phantom jackhammers and cranes. Sometimes – times like tonight, walking to the bathroom – I wonder how secure these windows really are.

I enter the bathroom. I slip into a stall. I sit on the toilet. I start thinking about this girl I used to play strange make-believe games with on the playground in elementary school. I wonder what happened to her. Did she find a study room and an organic chemistry exam to contain her, or is she floating out in the ether somewhere, feeding on pixie dust and young adult novels, her fantasy dragons breathing out soft charcoal fire? Will she wake up one day and find herself in my world? Or will I wake up one day and find myself in hers?

The light in the bathroom goes off. And then, the thought hits me, less like a battery of rain and more like a wave of fog: I’m not sure I’m at Barnard anymore.

Somewhere else? via Public Domain Pictures