So I’ve been really into the Academic Life™ lately and started to notice a few little things that strikes me as dark academia, so here’s a list:
1. Always wearing my family rings. The women in my family are problematic as hell and definitely have a part on the outcome monstrosity that I am today, so I’ve decided to embrace my biggest fear of becoming one of them in the future by always wearing my grandmother’s ring (that was passed down to her by her mother), my mother’s ring and my aunt’s ring. They’re all on the same hand and constantly haunt me with the reminder of the bad blood that runs through my veins.
2. Random numbers on the palm of my left hand in black ink. My University’s library is organized in codes and it’s really hard to find a specific book between thousands of others in the archive. Whenever I need a book, I look up its code and write it on my hand before my scavenger hunt - so by the end of the day I have about five or six lines of numbers and letters on my left hand, and nobody outside University knows why.
3. Walking with the Cryptid™ around campus at weird hours. I love my classical literature teacher, or as we call him, The Myth, but sometimes I feel obligated to grab a coffee with him and just sit on the bandstand to discuss Homer so I can argue with him about his interpretation of the Iliad. Wanna grab a coffee and smoke near the pool so I can tell you why Helen of Troy and Helen of Sparta have different meanings? Oh, you’re at the library and you just found this Longino copy about the Sublime and you want to know if I’m interested in joining you despite being dark already? Hell yeah.
4. Made up traditions with my friends. C’mon, we’re lit students! We have to be at least a bit pretentious. Drinking mead and absinthe on a horn that the biology students gave us? Speaking in latin with each other when walking on hallways and having other student’s eyes on us? The whole group gathering at this one person’s house every Tuesday for dinner and always wearing all black or all white? Yes.
5. Explaining concepts to myself (and ghosts) at unholy hours in my room under the shitty yellow light I have for a lamp while smoking a cigarette and drinking reheated coffee. I learn faster when explaining things. I’m not even sorry.
6. Carrying an umbrella with me every day. It hardly rains in my city and people are always looking at me with a confused expression whenever they see the big pointy black umbrella in my hands. This is actually because I walk to (and back from) Uni every day, so I don’t feel so powerless on the streets. You’ll really try to take my purse? Bring it on, punk.
7. Adding dead words to our vocabulary. My friends and I teamed up to buy this dead words dictionary and now we’re addicted to it. Walking around the corridors and using an old as time vocabulary really makes people curious and whenever the senior teachers hear us they look so intrigued!
8. So, okay, this one is probably my favorite. We bought a star. Yes. We gathered money to buy a start, named it after our group, and now we frequently go to the physics department observatory to look for it. We even have matching pendants with the location of our start and it’s name.
Extras that are responsible for making this semester look specially dark academia for me: the smell of warm grass that hits me when I’m crossing the campus; me and my friends using Homeric epithets; the feeling of warm shoes when I get home after a long day of walking around campus; constantly handing each other different books that we personally love (and making our group a big book club); the empty perfume bottles and black ballpoint pens at the end of the semester; small and quiet kisses on the knuckles and temple me and my friends got used to give each other whenever we’re close enough to touch; the unfinished chess game I started with my friend still on top of my book pile; honoring Donna Tartt and asking my friend ‘cubitum eamus?’ in front of my latin teacher and having him giggle; the weight of an old, dusty and almost in pieces book about the decline and fall of the roman empire that we particularly love; books that we pick up so often that it’s location is already memorized; sitting in the warm sunlight on the bandstand when changing classes, smoking and drinking way too sugary coffee; ditching linguistics classes to attend a Russian literature lecture on the other side of campus; forgotten pennies on my coat pockets that once were coffee change; my friend who keeps constantly changing languages and speaking in french mid-conversation with us;
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