on studenthood

I turned in the last of my coursework yesterday, and promptly began reading (for pleasure, something that rarely happens during the course of a school term).
When I was in the bookstore at some point, browsing through the gazillions of pens and papers and thicknesses of mat board, I also skimmed through the collection of sale books they had out on the table and happened upon a collection of short stories by Carol Shields (late Canadian authoress; The Stone Diaries won the Pulitzer in 1995).
Anyway, the short stories are a perfect strategy for schooltime reading, it's just too bad I didn't figure that out sooner. A satisfying break, short and sweet, enough to tide me over till the next juicy novel.
Reading one of the stories caught me reminiscing about student life already.
These are excerpts from Chemistry, about a group of students and the possibility of their reunion:

"The poverty we insinuate is part real and part desire. We see ourselves as accidental survivors crowded to the shores of a cynical economy. By evasion, by mockery, by mutual nibbling away at substance, we manage to achieve a dry state of asceticism that feeds on itself. We live on air and water or nothing at all; you would think from the misty way we talk we had never heard of parents or cars or real estate or marital entanglements. The jobs we allude to are seasonal and casual, faintly amusing, mildly degrading. So are our living arrangements and our live-in companions. For the sake of each other, out of our own brimming imaginations, we impoverish ourselves, but this is not a burdensome poverty; we exalt in it, and with our empty pockets and eager charity, we're prepared to settle down after our recorder lessons at a table at Le Piston and nurse a single beer until midnight . . .

"The moment comes when we should exchange addresses and phone numbers or make plans . . . to meet on a monthly basis, perhaps, maybe in the undeclared territory of our own homes, perhaps for the rest of our lives.
But it doesn't happen. The light does us in. The too-soft spring light . . . It forbids absolutely a final embrace, and something nearer shame than embarrassment makes us anxious to end the evening quickly and go off in our separate directions.
Not forever, of course. We never would have believed that. Our lives at the time were a tissue of suspense with surprise around every corner. We would surely meet again . . .
It may happen yet. The past has a way of putting its tentacles around the present.

"We would burrow our way back quickly into those winter nights, saying it's been too long, it's been too bad, saying how the postures of love don't really change. We could take possession of each other once again, conjure our old undisturbed, unquestioning chemistry. The wonder that it hasn't already happened. You would think we made a pact never to meet again. You would think we put and end to it, just like that --saying goodbye to each other, and meaning it."

{From Chemistry, Collected Stories, by Carol Shields}