Tuesday, April 5, 2011

Sleep Walkers

    It was a small group of people. Almost too small to be deserving of the title "group." They all sat around one of the library's many quaint round tables. The lighting was dim; the room was dank and stuffy. The chairs were made of old rust colored canvas material and the wooden legs and arms were worn with carvings from past students' use. Every once in awhile one of them got distracted by the flickering fluorescent and looked up to see if it was in fact the same light bulb that was going out just ten minutes ago. One of the girls was tapping her pencil against the palm of her hand almost in sync with the flickering rhythm of the dying light. None of them seemed annoyed by either. 
    The group looked oddly similar. Everyone wore the same placid expression on their face. It was the exhaustion. They had probably spent a good portion of their night at that table studying together. It wasn't that they weren't making progress; they just needed to absorb a lot of information. Over the course of an hour, they moved only their lips to talk and their fingers to write and turn book pages. They couldn't go on forever like this. They eventually and mechanically picked up their things and slid them into their bags. Some zipped them up and some didn't. Everyone was too tired to care if they lost pencils and other belongings on the way home. Sluggishly, they slept walked out the door into the warm night. 

No comments:

Post a Comment