The Pedestal

The two fraternal twin sisters, the red brick dormitory pillars of Texas Woman's University, have risen early to meet me. One stands a little taller than the other. On the horizon I see them marking my destination like pushpins in a paper map, "Larissa and Maria were here." 

Kneeling before the sisters, older and more humble, bows the Little Chapel in the Woods, and I suspect when I descend on those grounds I'll find some of the woods preserved, never felled and paved over. I expect I'll ramble under the same perennial trees with slightly thicker trunks, baring newly separated leaves. 

As soon as I step out I hear a familiar rhythm. A fresh batch of Autumn crisps drift together for a moment. They snap their fingers like tap dancers, take a bow in sequence, skedaddle off stage right. A whiff of a familiar bouquet unsheathes a tucked away scrapbook album leaf. Tidying up my cluttered attachments I exhale and turn the page, not ready yet to dig up any outgrown keepsakes. 

I'm winding my way down canopied sidewalks reading all the historical markers, brushing up on local history, surfacing facts, dislodging memories of my alma mater. The grassy patches and diagonal shortcuts are coming back to me like second nature. Every turn my campus map unfolds and expands until it is life size again, reborn. A thumbnail legend compresses the distance, I blink, and I'm in a lofty time again. The organic aroma of live oak leaves and bark and the symbiotic lichen slowly transforming woods brings me back to when I arrived, the first day I met Larissa. At that time we could see only uplifting possible futures from our vantage point up there, so high. 

I'm hours early for my uncle's wedding at the chapel. He’s not an alum like I am, but I can’t imagine a more suitable location for the occasion. The mother and woman themed stained glass windows and gothic arch woodwork are breathtaking. When Larissa and I were inseparable, before she dropped, we haunted these hallowed premises. The two of us crashed a couple of weddings at the chapel just for the hell of it. We dressed like old ladies at a funeral, climbed upstairs and wept and wailed, as loud and disturbing as we dared. Nobody ever admonished us or even acknowledged us at all, and we gave ourselves goosebumps for a suspended moment spooking ourselves with the notion we were channeling apparitions. 

Nearby Stark and Guinn Halls' sturdy red brick trunks reach skyward as if cultivated from magic beans, dwarfing the Little Chapel in the Woods. The dormitory towers defining University Drive appear monumental, as impressive and colossal as I remember from when I was a resident. The two match each other to a degree. They share a sensibility but they are not identical twins. Built in 1967 for second-year and continuing students, Stark Hall was the first skyscraper on campus. She is 21 stories of red brick exteriors with long adjacent patio balconies skirting her sides.

Guinn Hall, completed two years following for first-year students, rises 24 levels with cozy balconies wrapping each corner. The first night when we moved in to Guinn Hall, Larissa and I decorated our wing's balcony railing with red and white Christmas lights so we could always home in on our little nest from the ground. Our corner of heaven was easy to spot at night, halfway up on the southwest side, high above the chapel. After Larissa withdrew and disappeared I didn't plug the lights in anymore. I left the string on the railing to disintegrate, ditched like wilting flowers on a gravestone.

Trying to pull out of my tailspin, I withdrew my mind into chatter and trivia, reading up about the school's architectural history on my campus map. I was proud but not surprised to see that our old dormitory Guinn Hall has stood the test of time. She remains the tallest building on campus, from when she completed construction in 1969 up until the present day. Stark Hall makes a strong showing, in the top three for height, but she lost her brief hold on second place when the Administration Building rose a few feet higher shortly afterwards in 1975. They all sprouted up decades before we arrived though, and we felt like the towers had always been there waiting for us.

Naturally, when Larissa and I were still around everybody called the Administration Building the Clock Tower. Back then it still had a clock on it, although it never managed to show the same time nor the correct time on any of its four faces. I remember walking across campus checking every day to see "When will they fix the clock?" and the time was always "not today." I always figured they'd sort out the inner workings eventually, or maybe Larissa and I could sneak in someday, make our way to the top and behold its ticking heart, the building's gears and machinations, from the inside out. We could perch up there like gargoyles and whisper gossip, dare each other to indulge our temptations, like those peeping late nights up on our roost at Guinn Hall.

My feathers are ruffled when I notice that "They" finally solved the issue of the time always displaying incorrectly on the clock tower. It's always correct now. In fact, it's always NOW, since they replaced the clock faces essentially with a You Are Here sign worthy of a dead mall, just three garish glowing letters: "TWU."

Something about the so-called clock tower re-do irks me, intrigues my attention, gently chaperoning my deeper dread subliminal. I'm still not ready to unearth the pain of loss below the surface, between the lines of my inner dialogue. Ranting to no one in particular, to myself, to the squirrels, to the acorns and nuts, is always my go-to distraction from softer feelings, and I've got time to kill. 

I like clocks on towers, especially when the time is trustworthy. I have never liked text or logos on buildings though. It's too assertive, too predictable. With a clock on a tower, there's an invitation to face it, to see something new, even if you can't always trust what it tells you. Replacing the clock on the Administration Building with illuminated bold capital letters seems too easy. It feels like we gave up. Towers should not change.

For a few distracted steps my interior dissension pushes off, numbs a would-be crushing sadness. I try not to to recall how I descended to my loneliest, lowest depths after Larissa left for good.

My faculties are capitulating, my legs succumbing to gravity. I crumble into a bench and plant myself. The mist in the fog passes a threshold as tears well up, blurring my vision. I look up to the clock tower, disoriented. The deadpan expression on the Administration Building stares back at me unblinking.