My First Love

Chapter 25: The New Semester

The second semester had a different texture than the first.

Not better or worse — different in the way that sequels to good things are different. The first semester had the quality of discovery — everything new, everything being established, the map being drawn for the first time. The second semester had the quality of inhabitation. The map existed. The routes were known. The task now was to go deeper rather than wider.

Both of us felt it.

---

New classes brought new rhythms.

Prisca's documentary production seminar met Tuesday and Thursday mornings — a small cohort of eight students and a professor named Marcus Webb who had spent twenty years making films before deciding he wanted to teach people how to make them instead. She came back from the first session with the specific brightness of someone who had sat in a room and felt immediately at home.

"He screened a twelve-minute film in the first class," she told me Monday evening. "No introduction, no context. Just — lights down, film. Then when it ended he said *what did that cost the person who made it.* Not what did it mean. What did it cost."

"What was the answer?"

"That was the class," she said. "Ninety minutes on what it costs to make something true."

I looked at her. "You're going to love this course."

"I already do," she said simply.

---

My own new courses were solid without being remarkable.

A seminar on urban sociology that interested me genuinely, a statistics course that did not interest me at all but which I recognized as necessary, and a research practicum that required developing an actual field study over the course of the semester.

The practicum was the most demanding and the most alive — the kind of assignment that required genuine thinking rather than the management of existing knowledge.

I told Prisca about the field study requirement over coffee Tuesday.

"What will you study?" she said.

"I've been thinking about community response to institutional change," I said. "Specifically how neighborhood identity shifts when a major local institution — a school, a hospital, a longtime business — closes or relocates."

She looked at me with focused attention. "That's not a small question."

"No."

"Which neighborhood?"

"Somewhere in Boston. Still deciding the specific location." I paused. "I want it to be real. Not just academically interesting but actually mattering to actual people."

She nodded slowly. "Then the neighborhood will choose you," she said. "Go walking. Pay attention. The right place will be obvious when you find it."

---

The Voss project began its preliminary phase the second week of January.

Prisca received a project brief — detailed, specific, the kind of document that revealed how seriously Voss approached her work. Three subjects had been identified. A painter named Jerome based in Brooklyn, fifty-three years old, mid-career, working on what he described as the most ambitious and terrifying project of his professional life. A musician named Clara, twenty-eight, a cellist who was composing her first original album after a decade of performance work. A writer named Thomas, forty-one, a novelist returning to work after a three-year silence following his wife's death.

Prisca read the brief to me on Wednesday evening, seated on my floor with her back against the couch, the document on her laptop.

When she finished I was quiet for a moment.

"These are real people," I said.

"Yes."

"With real things at stake."

"That's the whole point," she said. "Voss doesn't make films about people performing difficulty. She makes films about people actually inside it." She looked at the screen. "The trust the subjects have to extend to let a camera into that space—" She paused. "That's what she meant. About my reel. The subjects weren't performing for the camera. They forgot it was there."

"Because you made them forget."

"Because I was genuinely interested in them," she said. "You can't fake that. People know."

---

Peter's semester had its own new development.

Sophie Chen had, over the winter break, apparently decided that she and Peter were serious enough to warrant meeting his mother, which Peter had agreed to with the slightly stunned expression of a man who had said yes before fully processing what he was saying yes to.

He told me about it Thursday over lunch with the expression of someone reviewing a decision he was committed to but still adjusting to.

"She suggested it," he said.

"Sophie suggested meeting your mother?"

"She said — and I am quoting directly — *I don't see the point of undefined relationships, Peter. Either we're building something or we're not.*" He paused. "I said we were building something."

"Are you?"

He looked at me with complete seriousness. "Yes," he said. "I genuinely am."

"Then meeting your mother is the right next step."

"My mother is going to love her immediately and intensely and Sophie is going to find that either charming or overwhelming."

"Which do you think?"

He considered it. "Sophie finds most things interesting rather than overwhelming," he said. "She'll probably analyze my mother and find her fascinating." A pause. "Which my mother will also love."

---

Abdullahi had news of his own.

He had been accepted to present a paper at an undergraduate research symposium in March — a paper on institutional economics and community development that he had been working on since October with the methodical focus he brought to everything.

He told us at dinner, briefly and without particular emphasis, as though it were a routine update rather than a significant achievement.

Peter stared at him. "You wrote a paper and submitted it to a symposium and you're telling us now?"

"I submitted in November," Abdullahi said. "The acceptance came yesterday."

"Abdullahi."

"It is one paper," he said. "At one symposium."

"It is a peer-reviewed academic symposium and you are an undergraduate," Peter said. "That is not nothing."

Abdullahi considered this with the brief, neutral expression he used when he found something accurate but excessive. "It is not nothing," he allowed. "But it is one step. There will be others."

Prisca, across the table, looked at him with the quiet recognition she gave things she genuinely respected.

"Congratulations, Abdullahi," she said. Simply and directly.

He looked at her. "Thank you, Prisca," he said. With the same quality.

Two precise people exchanging an honest moment.

I watched it and felt, not for the first time, the particular warmth of being surrounded by people who were genuinely good at being themselves.

---

The second Saturday of January Prisca and I walked.

Her suggestion — *go walking, pay attention, the right place will be obvious* — had been sitting with me since Tuesday and I wanted to act on it. She offered to come, which I accepted without hesitation.

We took the T to a neighborhood south of the university that I had passed through but never properly explored — Cleary Hill, a residential and small-commercial area with the particular texture of a neighborhood that had been through several versions of itself and was currently in transition.

We walked for two hours.

She was quiet beside me in the specific way she was quiet when she was observing — not withdrawn, just fully present in her eyes rather than her voice. She noticed things. A mural on a wall that had been painted over but not completely — the old image bleeding through the new one. A barbershop with a hand-lettered sign that had been there clearly for decades. A community board outside a church covered in notices, some new and some weathered, layered on top of each other like geological strata.

"Here," she said, at some point, stopping in front of a vacant lot that had clearly once held a building. The concrete foundation was still visible. A few people had placed flowers at the edge.

"What was here?" I said.

She pointed to a small laminated notice attached to the chain-link fence.

*In memory of Cleary Hill Community Center. Established 1962. Closed 2019.*

I looked at the lot for a long moment.

The flowers. The foundation. The notice.

"Here," I said.

"Yes," she said. "Here."

---

I added a mark to the map that evening.

Cleary Hill. The vacant lot on Morrison Street.

Twenty-two marks.

Each one a door into something real.