January arrived with the specific quality of a year that knew it was the last one of something.
Not melancholy — purposeful. The way the final chapter of a good book feels purposeful. You read differently when you know the ending is approaching. Not faster. More attentively.
Senior year second semester.
The last one.
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We came back to Boston on the second of January.
The train from Chicago — Prisca had flown back from Portland and met me at Union Station, which felt right, the two of us arriving at the same place from different directions and continuing together.
She slept on the train.
I sat beside her and looked out the window at the winter landscape moving past — flat and white and honest, the midwest giving way gradually to the northeast, the landscape changing its character
