The last gasp came in October.

Bitter spasm of emotion, relationship dead.

Neither of us expected it to last, of course--she tunneling towards thesis and medical school, me jabbing a reporter's typewriter in suburbia. Still, when it blew, I wasn't ready. Harvard was over.

Graduation the June before wasn't a graduation at all. The presumptuous red H's set in vanilla ice cream, the platitudes of college president and housemaster, didn't seem much different from the presumption and platitudes of the previous four years. It was just another day (albeit the last) at Harvard.

Summer brought more delusions. Sure I had a reporter's job in suburban Danvers. But there didn't seem much difference between that and the variety of other jobs I'd held summers earning money to pump into Mother Harvard's coffers.

The relationship of 18 months lingered on--a superficial symbol of what I still believed to be the status quo.

The crunch came in October as personal attachments went down the tube--a rancorous, belated graduation present.

Ripeness is all. You're never really prepared, it seems, for the end of anything--especially love affairs and college. And when they're packaged as a doubleheader, the effect is chilling.

A queer sense of emptiness takes over--a mild nausea of remembrance that seeps through daily routine. And of all the frustrations and traumas confronting you after leaving Harvard, that nausea, that emptiness spawned as the college community casts you out, is perhaps the toughest to deal with.

For me, a single in Danvers's bedroom community, it was particularly difficult. If you want to learn loneliness, try suburbia. And if you want to learn suburbia, try Danvers. A middle-class sprawl of shopping center parking lots, Astroturfed traffic islands, and ranch-style roosts for the not-quite-Ipswich commuter set, Danvers didn't make transition easier for me.

It wasn't so much that I disliked the town--I just had difficulty relating to it. My relationship with my neighbors, the just-married Connallys, is an example. I didn't dislike the Connallys, but there was a distinct absence of rapport.

Peter Landry '74 now lives in Middlebury, Vt. and works for the Burlington Free Press.

Key to this aloofness between us was Precious, a bastardized mouse of a chihuahua. Precious was the yin and yang of the Connally marriage--on any given night the pitch and frequency of the despicable creature's yaps would reveal the flow of the marital battle--the advances and retreats of the two sides, the victories, the losses.

There was more to Precious, of course, than vaps. The rodent was an emblem of a lifestyle, a get-married, settle-down, buy-a-house routine that seemingly afflicted everyone in Danvers as soon as high school closed its doors on them. Bereft of such designs, I had difficulty relating to people who would want the beast yapping underfoot.

With traditional neighbor-neighbor friendliness undermined. I found few avenues for social diversion.