Ghost Campus

Today, I went in to uni to pick up my chair and a few books. The last time I was there was in March to pick up some stuff before the inevitable lockdown. I was more pessimistic than other then, but even I didn't imagine the campus would be locked down for so long. My guess was it would reopen in June, and here we are in July. The campus resembled a ghost town. Before Covid, whenever I was on campus, I would always see students milling around, even on New Year's Eve. Today, there was no one except a few construction workers. The local students must have gone home before lockdown, and the foreign students must have taken repatriation flights home. The building felt like the people had just dropped what they were doing and left to escape from an invading army which never arrived. Plants wilting from months of neglect, coffee cups, books, papers left on desks, biscuits on cupboard tops--all signs that people left in a hurry and didn't expect to be away for long.
The room that had been my home for most of my waking hours in the past three years felt like the soul had been drained out of it. The circular table where I had spent many an hour indulging in my favourite hobby of gazing out of windows, the whiteboards I used for brain-storming as I paced the length of the PhD room were all still there. I used to believe that these were key to my productivity. Today, the sight of them stirred nothing in me. I didn't even notice the whiteboard. My place of work is my bedroom now. I suspect I will only go to the PhD room again to get stuff I need, and to move out when I finish my PhD. I was extremely attached to that space and some of my fellow inhabitants. I was dreading the prospect of working from home when lockdown struck. Now, it feels like the most natural thing to do. It feels like an era passed without me even realizing.