My greatest loves and opps on Notre Dame’s campus

Before Maria, Jack, Ben and Rob, even before Angela, before all my Notre Dame people, whose voices I now carry in my heart, first I met the many buildings that make up Notre Dame’s beautiful, intricate, confusing campus.

These structures of concrete and steel made themselves known to me; for me, they unveiled their quirks and their darkest selves. I cannot leave The Observer without a nod to these buildings, all characters in their own right, the most enduring pieces of this campus.

So this is for you, all of you who were my first, if not my greatest loves, and for you, my greatest on-campus opps.

The Basilica

I know that God’s love has a fragrance because it permeates your vast wideness, the listening darkness of your confessionals.

But to me, you are also the nostalgia of four years. You are the smooth curves of the crosses etched into the sides of every wooden pew; you are the twisting spiral to the choir loft that I run up every Sunday morning; you are the thundering reverberation of the organ that rushes in through my feet to fill all the space in my chest; you are Andy’s loud inhale before glorious music bursts through our bodies; you are the sunlight streaming in through the stained glass windows, turning the world into reds, purples and blues for one magical moment.

You are my constantly changing self. You are the chaos of the Easter vigil night, you are the arms I held crossed over my chest for months of Sunday masses, you are my tears, my joy and my starved body finally brought to fullness by the eucharist resting on my tongue. You are my becoming, my renewing.

LaFun

I think we were nemeses in a past life. Perhaps this is why you hate me so much now, to make up for all the times I vanquished you in the past. Or perhaps, you are just a terribly and inaccessibly designed building.

I have so many unanswered questions about you. Why would you have a flight of steps, right in the middle of a wide corridor, yawning its mouth like a gaping hole into the abyss? Every time I walk through you, I remember the first semester of my freshman year, when I almost fell down your stupid stairs. Every time I trail my hand along your railing and think of all the bones that could have broken that day, all the debt I could have accumulated as an international student navigating the U.S. healthcare system.

Also, why does the route back from you to my dorm always feel like an impossible maze? Do you know how stupid and annoyed I feel when I get confused and turn away from that one sidewalk (you know what I’m talking about), and then shuffle my feet through campus at night for what feels like hours because I hate asking for help?

And what is it with the 11 steps on the staircase near the entrance that faces the Basilica? Who in their right mind would choose a weird number like 11, when they could easily go with a solid even number like 10! I can feel your steel railings vibrate as you cackle in glee, staring at me as my body jerks forward, and my brain realizes too late that, once again, I forgot to count the 11th step. But remember, I haven’t fallen yet.

Duncan and the library

I don’t like you at all. Even in the absence of any valid reason, the rebellious part of me would have still hated you because of your extreme popularity with most of the student body. But with your loudness, your seats packed with people, your lack of simple symmetry, your show-offy vastness, you are just too much for my cane and my introverted self.

O’Shag

You feel like a long, damp, dark tunnel with walls pressing in on me from each side. But I will give you points for your dry simplicity.

Decio

I am trying my best to get to know you, even to love you, for the English department’s sake. But you are making it so hard. Although I have known you only for a month, I am losing count of the number of times I have gotten lost trying to find you or leave you? Why do you sprawl and curve like a giant that doesn’t know what it wants to do with its huge body and many limbs? And why did you go and attach yourself to Malloy, as if my brain didn’t have too many campus map complications to deal with already! Why can’t you be normal, a simple square of brick with one entrance and a straight path leading to you?

Bond Hall

Your lower levels feel like a claustrophobic dungeon, but the upper floors feel like the marble-tiled corridors of a beautiful mansion. Whenever I think of you, I will remember what Gabby told me, that your classrooms look out toward the shining blue of the lake.

Como

Of all Notre Dame’s buildings, I love you the most.

I loved you first because of your beautifully simple rectangle-ness, the perfection of your corridors, not too narrow, not too wide, the directness of all your sharp right angles. Then I loved you because of the music that pervades all of you, the unfathomable wonder of an eight-part harmony, the sudden beauty of a rising soprano line stealing out through a crack in the door. But I love you most because, over these four years, you have become mine. Your three flights of stairs with the chunky and slender railings became mine; all your windows became mine, but especially that window on the third floor with the bust of someone who wears what my fingers think is a shirt with buttons became mine and only mine.