You know it’s serious when you stay the night for the first time. Sometimes it’s that special someone. Sometimes it’s a friend whose couch is always open to you. Sometimes it’s a space where you can blast Pink Floyd from a tinny speaker at 3 am, and no one cares that you’re tracing out the retinogeniculate pathway in radioactive tints, that you’re alternately belting out the approximate lyrics to “Time” and muttering to yourself about tetrodotoxin and retinal waves.

But: I had a paper to finish, I had keys and after-hours access. I had approximately 12 hours until the deadline. I had permission.

I started at the Biosignal Lab halfway down September, and even though my only duties here are to assist with Lindsey’s honours project and water the cacti (yes, really) I find myself spending a lot of time here. It’s a good space. It’s a friendly space. It’s an inspiring space. I come here to study, and the studying comes easy. I come here to write, and the ideas come fast.

The sense you get, walking in here, is that this is a place where people step across boundaries. You don’t have to be a particular thing here. It’s a physics lab doing neuroscience research, but the space is open to anything you bring to it. It’s a place to belong and to be, not just a space to use. People come here to grade psych labs, do stats assignments, write neuroscience papers, memorize poems, to just sit down on the beanbag chair and study.

That’s what I like about the whiteboard. The Slate, if I’m staying on-brand. It’s a tool for people to think, to relax, to demonstrate, and it’s something of a cross-section of the people that use it. I hope people use it as they move through here, wiping away anything in the way. And if they draw something they like, or see something they like, maybe they can take a snapshot and write one of these themselves.