Headspace: A series in which teaching staff and students from the English Department write about a place or space they go to write, read, study or create. [Read all entries.]  [Revisit the “Ongoing” series.] [Revisit the “Interrogative” series.]

The book-bricked silence; the crowded commons of coffee-stained breaths; fingers tap-dancing on greasy keyboards; the birth of theses, CVs, undergraduate poetry and emails in the the wrong register; negotiations with photocopiers; projects inducted in ice-cube cubicles; friends; a pop-up Kama Sutra as birthday gift; “Luk6 Lau4, Sixth Floor, Liu4 Lou3” from the elevator; a piece of carelessly preserved toilet paper in a Yeats Reader; deflections of big names; the crispy corner of a book not borrowed for a hundred and twenty years; sleepers; hoarders hoarded by aisles of knowledge; surfers on unlimited Wi-Fi; faces tracing themselves on the window pane; trees looking older in the dark riddled by the city’s sparks; bird’s eye views of society members too young for suits, of banners in People’s Liberation Army Kowloon East Barracks; empty seats watched over by hardbacks; uncles reading the newspaper at 11p.m.; a graduating student’s fear from boxes to boxes on the Ming Pao classifieds page; teachers writing instead of grading; outside the world that is not visible until a night bus drives across one’s reflection; veins highly inflammable to a certain quote.

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Cheng Tim Tim is a final-year student in the Department of English and Department of Education. She has problems with proper nouns. She is one of the founding co-editors of EDGE. [Read all entries by Tim Tim.]