Ever Haunted By Yellow Windows in anticlimatic

When I think of college, two images flash my mind. The first is a tall doorway casting yellow light into bitter falling snow. The second also features yellow light, coming out of a square window in an office building across a highway. Both are at night, and have little to do with college itself. I have more memories, of course, of the actual day to day details, but that word- in association with that era- is associated to me, predominately, by those two aforementioned images.

The images have feelings as well. The doorway light pouring out into the snowy darkness…it reminds me of a painting, something you’d see in a nursery of a winter scene in the evening. But just a hint of that- the coziness of youth and ignorance. Also a very dark, very contemporary realism. The feeling that something was very for real, but just out of sight. Around the dark corners.

The window across the highway into the office building was my view from the dorm window I first slept in, when visiting a friend’s older brother at a college- my first time ever to visit and hang out at one. Why do I remember that window? And the distant train whistle, once in a while? The image is like a photograph. A large mostly dark canvas of city shapes, a threatening highway, and a window of sickly yellow light keeping tabs on an older- but contemporary- generation at the helm. I was yet a child, but in that office were people who had been in middle management for decades, perhaps on the verge of retirement. They knew the world to which I was arriving better than I could, and I looked up to them for it. At the time I didn’t realize the futility of the situation. Not consciously, at least. But that sickly yellow light, ever shrinking inside the darkness surrounding it, I think I knew it on a deeper level- the fact that their world would pass with them, and our world would only slightly resemble it.

Last updated November 23, 2021