Fresh, man

September. New highlighters, new loafers, new goals. A new school year. A new beginning. September is, in my academia-led life, my New Year. 

A blurred capture of the Wren library at dusk after listening to Trinity choir sing on punts, as we rushed through the college to pre's. An apt capture of the frenzy of undergraduate days in Cambridge. One of my favourite pictures of first year, precisely because of its innocent ineptitude and undue glory, its unabashed identity. 

This October someone else will sit at my desk by the window to a 20cm wide balcony, leaning back in the way my year 9 German teacher told us not to on the chair that should have been, according to my room itinerary, a swirly chair, and gazing intermittently at the three drooping shelves above their head and the people playing basketball on the courts outside, in lieu of the blank word document staring at them from a virginal laptop screen. Someone else will spend hours pinning polaroids onto the small board by the desk and imprint holes into their fingers for the next week. It'll be someone else's heart in their mouth as they boil the kettle they brought with them under the advice of every cliche Fresher Guide on the internet in the corner of the room with the balcony door jarred open, as far away from the smoke detector as possible for fear of being that person who sets off the alarms and forces everyone outside. The room will tell different stories. That night planned to be a mean feat of tackling an essay crisis which spontaneously turned into a four hour long tea party might become instead a spontaneous 3am Coldplay rave. The solid week the room spent covered in glitter, sequins and stars, with white tie dresses, ball tickets, high heels and red lipsticks lying in a mosaic across the floor and covering all but the very shyest peeks of furniture might instead be a week of binge-watched Gilmore Girls episodes with new friends huddled around a small laptop screen, covered in an array of quilts and dotted with sliced apples covered in peanut butter and biscotti. The 3am phone calls complete with cross country pacing around the room in a vain hunt for signal may instead be a reel of early morning inspiration, of poetry sprawled across discarded Sainsbury's receipts. It'll be someone else's room in October, but N15 will always be my room. And changing its resident and the stories it'll tell a year later doesn't erase my residency or the stories I protagonised.

"Ah, September! You are the doorway to the season that awakens my soul... but I must confess that I love you only because you are a prelude to my beloved October." (Peggy Toney Horton)

"Autumn seemed to arrive suddenly that year. The morning of the first September was crisp and golden as an apple." (J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and The Deathly Hallows)

September is my favourite time of year.

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More/Inspiration:

117 Maynard Hall, King's College London Hampstead Campus by Amy V Norris

Golden Days by Rosalind Jana

Warning: this post contains much #nostalgia #poeticism and #Romanticism