Have in your hold the great image And the empire will come to you. Coming to you and meeting with no harm It will be safe and sound. Music and food Wil induce the wayfarer to stop. The way in its passage through the mouth is without flavor. It cannot be seen, It cannot be heard, Yet it cannot be exhausted by use.

- Tao te ching


***

For nearly the first year that I've been in this city I've been caged inside four blocks of concrete and textbooks, holed up in a monolithic, academic prison. When I came to Cincinnati I was equal parts excited and lonely - simultaneously thrilled to explore a new city but overcome at times with the melancholy that comes with leaving ones friends behind. I thought - perhaps naively - that I'd have time to get out and see Cincinnati, learn its history firsthand and meet people outside of my study group.

No dice, soldier.

The past ten months were filled with crushing amounts of work and my entire social circle was reduced to eight or nine people whose experiences were almost identically my own. We saw each other every day, ate at the same hospital cafeterias, took the same classes, even sometimes studied in the same digs. We slogged through the year, zombie like, trying to shove as much information as possible between our ears while making damn sure that little got between our legs. Alive but Lifeless, Sexed but Sexless.

There is something to be said for always being busy - for time planned down to the hour with lectures and seminars, early mornings and tired sunsets. But it wears a body down slowly, slyly, flesh against the millstone. And when it ends one is left with an almost perplexing sense of nothingness - time opening like a flower to yield only the emptiest void.