Cool April early morning, I sit beneath Grotto lamplight -- safety light in unsafe South Bend. It's just me and an amazing sense of solitude -- of all the thousands of students and others who make up our ND community, I'm the only one here at crazy 2 a.m. Monday morning.

It's like when I used to come freshman year down here by myself on Sunday evenings after or during dorm masses. I'd e here by myself with several others around me. Down here by the lakes, it's barely Notre Dame -- and hardly South Bend ugly city.

It's a separate place.

A biker pedals by, then NDPD Blue, speeding around campus to keep us safe.

A cool, quiet, fountain-gurgling peacefulness here on cool April morning with tulips blooming along the path to the lake. I may never be in this place again. I'll leave now the way I would freshman year -- behing the Dome toward Grace Hall, though no longer my dorm -- or anyone else's.

Those college days here I would sit under the lights, slouched on the bench, staring at the flickering glow from beneath the hillside. Freshman year, I�d often be here on Sunday nights while many dorms were still offering mass. It would be the most poignant yet serene time to be here, with scattered others before the rush. After masses ended, couples often stopped by on the way back to one dorm or the other � he walking her home; she walking him home. They�d stop together, light a candle together, kneel together, pray together. In three, two years, one year later, they might return and he�d propose, or so I�ve read from so many Grotto stories.

In fall it was wonderful, the crisp autumn air in my first South Bend was invigorating, and endeared me to the place before I knew what the winters held while still struggling with the separation from home, from friends, from the long high school relationship that we didn�t have the foresight to end before departing. Over and over in my head, I would imagine what it would be like to bring my friends from home here, to show them this place, this Grotto, beneath the towering oaks, alongside the lake, below the Golden Dome. I�d bring them down the stairs to the left, the light from the candles emerging from the rocks as we walked in front of the display. We�d stop and stand, staring, smiling, feeling warm on an October night. I would sit there, thinking this, feeling good, feeling warm when it might be 50 degrees out and the wind blows through my jacket. After a while � 20 minutes sometimes, an hour others � I�d realize I was cold; having not felt it, or not noticed it; I was comfortable, now I�d be shivering.

And that would be time to go. Time to get up and choose the path back home, either up the stairs behind the Dome back to Grace, or the long way along South Quad, then the unknown other side of campus. Walking back, often still lost in thought, still mulling, soon smiling, I�d not notice my path, or those who crossed it. More than once I was startled by a simple "Hello" from a soft voice in the darkness and might turn to return it, wondering if I�d seen her before, or would sometime again.

And maybe that time has yet to come.