I ended up making the argument that the mirror, a site of feminine vanity, becomes the font of Prior’s self-awareness, the bridge through which he is able to access his fortitude in the face of AIDS. I compared the Angel breaking through his ceiling to a figure from his fantastic reflection breaking through a mirror into reality, to serve as his guide as Prior begins to recognize himself as a visionary, someone who fully accepts himself, including the femininity that Roy Cohn takes such great pains to hide. Roy, in contrast, never looks at himself in the mirror—literally and figuratively—and therefore does not possess the power of self-reflection as he denies his homosexuality throughout the play and eventually dies alone, with neither a chosen family nor a community to comfort him.

I wrote the whole draft in a fugue, and when I finally thought to look at the clock on the wall behind me, it was four in the morning. I read through what I had written and, for the first time, felt worthy of being at Harvard. I wasn’t sure whether I would feel this way the next day or even the next hour, but I tried to hold on to that feeling as I put the pages in a folder and left the computer lab to go back to my dorm.

It was eerie to come out of that room and find the facility half-lit with absolutely no one outside, not a single student or even a guard, as if there had been some cataclysmic event while I was working on my paper and I was now the only person in the world. I approached the building exit, a wall of glass with a revolving door in the middle, and sensed even from afar that there was something different about the landscape beyond, brighter, until I remembered as I got closer that the snow must have now settled on the ground.

Though I was unprepared in my fall jacket, it still felt warmer outside than I’d anticipated, maybe because of the excitement of seeing snow for the first time, which was still falling at a languid pace. I walked through the giant arched gate into the Yard and traversed the long diagonal from one side of that field to the other, Widener Library in front of me, Emerson Hall to my left, on my way to Wigglesworth, my dorm at the southeast corner. I got to the end of the path but didn’t feel like going inside, so I turned around.

There was only a single set of tracks in the snow, and those tracks were mine.