I will bring locusts into your country tomorrow. They will cover the face of the ground so that it cannot be seen.
—Exodus 10:3–6

So apparently the Cellar is closed for the winter now. Considering the recent state of the C-store shelves, one begins to understand why.

See, here’s what appears to have happened. We have all these students who are on meal plans. Surprisingly, not everyone’s estimates of how much they were going to eat this semester turned out to be accurate. Sure enough, we ended up with plenty of students who needed a way to burn some excess dining dollars. Combine this with the C-store’s food supply, which was meant to satisfy the student body for the duration of a semester and no more, and the results are evident.

I suppose this is symbolic of how the campus is starting to empty out now. People are leaving for vacation, roommates are saying goodbyes, and the Wi-Fi has mysteriously become slightly more reliable. Even the air has lost its warmth – it now bites and tears at those parts of us that we foolishly leave outside of our coats. Soon the Diner will stop accepting our meal plans at all, but I will be gone before then. Vanished to a mysterious realm cloaked in fog and battered by wind, not too far from the forges of steel wings. That is to say, I will be remaining in Washington.

The class lists for next semester certainly aren’t empty, though. A month from now, the campus will be reborn. Not everyone who left will return – just as not everyone who showed up in August is still here. We may be seeing some new faces around campus, though. If the wrinkled trio of Fate so decrees, I may even end up with a roommate who isn’t imaginary.