Photo by Freepik
by Andrew Bertaina
He had always loved academia or at the very least, the idea of academia. He thought that as he gazed out from his office window at the cranes swinging in the distance. Another building project undertaken for hundreds of millions of dollars, which fell under a certain budget allocation, inaccessible to faculty members like himself. His office was temporary anyway, someone else was on book leave, which meant he hadn’t even changed the posters or bookshelves, everything was someone else’s, a sign of his impending absence, the opposite of the buildings being slowly erected by the cranes, which were creating presence where absence had once been, an old parking lot for faculty and staff. He still loved or so he told himself, the idea of academia, though he could not square how little it loved him back. He sat down with a student essay, trying to keep his mind on the flow of the sentences, not wanting to think any more about his absence or the cranes, just the flow of words, smooth across the screen.
Andrew Bertaina is the author of the short story collection One Person Away From You (2021), and the forthcoming essay collection, The Body is a Temporary Gathering Place (Autofocus).
