After I dropped my friend Chris off at home, I turned up the volume and sang like I thought no one was listening. It must have been near freezing outside, but I rolled down all the windows and pounded the beat of the music into the roof of the car. It was 2 a.m., the roads were empty, and I was finally free.

It started as a trip to the bookstore. Not the local Borders, but the distant Barnes and Noble with its two floors of books. It was the kind of trip to keep my mind off OSU. (Oh, how I wish I were back there.) It was supposed to be the night I turned Chris on to House of Leaves, my all-time favorite book. But plans change, and it became the night of a spontaneous trip to Malone College.

It was 10:30 that night when Chris brought up the idea. "Okay." No maps, no directions, no sense of what we were doing—we just left. Inevitably, we got lost. But I broke no traffic rules aside from hopping the median just in time and bumping the parking hub when we got there. My friend Jenna flagged us into the visitors lot.

Because we were boys and because it was near midnight, we couldn't go into the dorms. (Malone has hilarious rules. When a guy is in a girl's room, the door must be open at at least a 45-degree angle and both your feet must remain on the floor at all times. Thank God I go to OSU where the positioning of my feet is far from my most worrisome concerns.) Instead, Jenna took us to this lodge-styled common room—after we used the bathrooms, of course.

It was really nice. There was faux-leather couches and chairs surrounding coffee tables all over the room. The ceiling had that rustic look of an unfinished cabin home, and modern track lights snaked across the ceiling. I don't think OSU has a place like this; at least not a place this empty at midnight. There was only one other couple seated at the grouping of furniture behind me, quietly reviewing for a final.

We didn't stay long. The campus was deserted, but I wanted to see the cross country course. I've run at Malone twice for cross country meets, and while I was here, I was determined to bring up the memories. I didn't know where I was going, but I intuitively walked up the road along the side of the building we just left. And there it was: the open grass, with its hills and mounds, all covered in snow. On race day, people would line this area, and there would be port-a-potties to my right. But tonight it was silent, the ground was coated in snow, and the field was free of runners.

I didn't stand there long; Chris was pelting me with snowballs. So we left.