Last Moments

I am in my last full term of university. We call it Lent term here and for two years it was a tiresome eight week struggle through bad weather and bad essays. Now, I have only two weeks left of Lent term and I find myself wishing it could stretch out just a little longer.

Time works so strangely in this place that all at once it slows down and speeds up so that eight weeks feels like half a year and nothing at all. I am sure I have done a lot this term but I can barely remember. Last week feels about a month ago, and yet each day has gone by without me really noticing.

I have spent two and a half years in this place wishing time would speed up and now I find myself trying to go back and collect the memories and the moments I wasn't thinking about. Why wasn't I thinking about them? I want time to spread out so I can go back and forward to the present and comprehend everything I did, everything I felt. But it has all been so fast and slow and there is nothing I can do about it.

Now I am having Last Moments and they are all tinged with a happy sadness. Almost nostalgia, but not quite. Currently I am sat in my college's beautiful library with its perpetual smell of dust and old books and I am remembering all the times I wished I could leave and do something else. But now I wonder how many times I have left in this lovely old room, and how much I should be savouring it. I know that in only half a year's time I will be thinking back, the latticed windows and high ceiling and uncomfortable wooden chairs suddenly becoming figments of my imagination. Things that only exist in my memory, and not just a walk down the long corridors from my own bedroom.

Of course, these last moments will go by quicker than any other now that I know the finish line is so near and the next part of my life awaits. But, still, I will cling to them even on the sloggish days, even when it rains, even when I really could just do with nipping home for a bit. Not long, now.