CAMBRIDGE, England — “This is the best people-watching of my entire life,” I said, almost breathlessly. My friend laughed and set two cups of coffee on our table. We sat for a moment in silence along the King’s Parade thoroughfare.
The imperious King’s College gates loomed just across the footpath and well-dressed students—overcoats and scarves and biking to class down cobblestone streets—sipped from warm mugs and listened intently to one another. Though out of place, I leaned back in my seat and tried to blend in.
“Oh,” my friend remarked, sideways. “But that girl is crying.”
“Tell her to pull up a chair and let us help,” I replied. We joked about setting up a life advice stand. The scene felt so literary as to not be real. All of Cambridge does, at least to the uninitiated. To compensate, I began to envision what my life would look like here: overcoats and scarves and biking to class on cobblestone streets.
The sun set beyond distant buildings and we only knew when stars began to dot the sea-dark sky, one after the next. Unlike my friend, I lacked a student ID card and was relegated to the realm of visitors barred from entry on the ever-present “Closed to Visitors” signs posted outside nearly all of the thirty-one colleges at Cambridge.
“I’m a student here,” my friend improvised to the porter at one of the college gates. “And my friend just applied. Can he come in with me, quickly, to take a look?”
The guard sighed and nodded. “Just this once, but quick.”
Our hushed thank-yous traveled through the cold evening air as we ducked through the low-hanging, narrow entryway. An inner courtyard spread before us like a blanket stretched over sand, vast and uniform—devoid of people and even pigeons. The faint sound of music and the intermittent glistening of the chapel’s stained glass windows drew us toward the nightly requiem service, which we admired for a minute then walked on. A steady fog crept in over the River Cam and crows cawed far away; the willow trees bristled back and forth, back and forth.
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