He had just got out from the twenty-five floors building when he realized that he did not care much about the outcome of that interview. He stepped forward towards the railing of the terrace in front of the entrance of the building. He was looking at his feet. How was it possible that he did not care at all about a conversation that could have given him a job? Where was the expected hope for a positive feedback that the capitalist all-happy-if-you-have-a-bunch-of-money world usually recommended to feel in those circumstances?

The past was there, behind his and that man’s words. The past was there with its thickness and density. Sincerely, he believed that five thousand miles were enough to cover it, or at least to silence its contradictions and misunderstandings. They were still there though, heavy as boulders, heavy as the amount of work that usually kept him away from that process of unconscious recollection. He laughed. The idea of erasing the past traces of his life was a mere illusion.

He got a coffee in the bar at the corner and sat in a small chair beside the window. He could see the street flowing a few centimeters from him, extremely loud and incredibly close, as Safran Foer would say, yet silent and far away, pushed away from the thick glass that hid him behind a transparent curtain. Hoping to cancel those traces was a mistake. In their way, they could be useful there, far from home and the places where those events had taken place. Beyond the banal refrain of the Historia-magister-vitae thing, he thought he could give those events a different meaning, looking at them from his new supposed-graduate present. Easy to write that though. He stepped outside, still thinking about the condition of awareness that he wanted to believe as definitely reached.

Banner image by GradLife McGill Instagrammer @falisha.k // @gradlifemcgill