by Paul Hina
skirt, anxiously wrapping the material around her long, thin fingers.
"What's on your mind?" he asks as he returns to his desk chair.
They are only a few feet apart, and he can still smell the vanilla on her flesh. They're so close that he can almost feel her body's warmth, or at least he's imagining that the heat he feels is her heat. His hand could effortlessly reach for her knee, and as this occurs to him, he also grows fidgety, grabbing one of the buttons of his shirt and playing with it out of fear that his impulses might be stronger than his self-control, particularly in the fullness of her presence, the enormity of their aloneness.
The privacy is palpable.
And the air is considerably more difficult to breathe than it was only minutes before.
"When I asked you about Melissa the other day, I really wanted to ask you what happened. I guess what I mean is, what went wrong? You clearly loved her."
"Yes, I did."
"I know it's forward, and I'm fully aware that it's none of my business, but I've just been overwhelmed with curiosity about her, and your relationship with her."
"It's funny. No one has ever really asked me about Melissa, at least in as far as what happened between us. I've had people ask me if I've run into her since Imeros was published, or they'll ask what she thought about the book, but no one has ever asked me about her, what kind of person she was when I knew her. And, to be honest, it's been so long since I've talked about her that it's a little strange for me to revisit."
"I'm sorry. I know it's awkward. I just—"
"No, it's alright. It is strange. No doubt about it. But it's good," he says, and takes a deep breath. "Honestly, ever since you asked about her, I've been going back over that time of my life. And I've thought about what I would say about her, about us, but—"
"I knew there was a 'but' coming."
"But," he says, smiling at her, "I wonder if my telling you about Melissa might change what the poems mean to you. I... Well, I don't want to presume too much, but it seems to me that those poems mean something important to you, and I would hate to think that I did something to endanger that meaning."
"How do you mean?"
"Well, you may already have an idea in your head about who Melissa is, and I don't want to change any perception that you have accepted by incurring truth on your imagination. It could end up changing how you feel about the poems."
"I don't think anything could change the way I feel about them."
"Wait a minute, though. Think about Dickinson. We've been talking about her now for a few days, and I always get the impression that her work begins to take on a more romantic aura only after the students learn about her life. They don't identify with her until they hear how profoundly private and lonely she was, or that the vast majority of her poems were never seen until they were discovered in a trunk after she died. They attach themselves to her loneliness. They attach her to their own worries about a life lived in near anonymity. For a lot of my students, it's only after they learn her backstory that they identify with the poems. But the truth is that she would probably be, to us at least, a very dull person. But the story of her life is told through these tiny fragments that make her work seem mythic. Retrospect, and the benefit of knowing her work's longevity, casts her in an almost heroic light, but there was almost certainly none of that light around her while she lived."
"But what's that have to do with you and Melissa?"
"Everything. Learning the truth behind poems will always change the way you read them. Besides, I'm reasonably sure that what you imagine happened between us is more interesting than the truth could ever be. If for no other reason than its mystery."
"Why don't you let me decide that?"
"Listen," he says, resigned to her determination, "if by the end of the quarter, you're still as interested about this as you are right now, then I'll answer any question you have. I'll tell you the whole story—as I remember it—if that's what you want."
"Promise?"
"I do."
She's looking around his office now, nervously trying to think of something to say, not wanting this time to end. She sees Imeros face down and in an opened position on his desk. "Are you reading it?" She asks, motioning toward the book.
He reaches out and touches the book, almost instinctively, wishing he had not left it out, embarrassed that he's been caught reading his own work. "I am."
"How come?"
"Well, when I saw that you were reading it the other day, I started thinking about how long it's been since I'd read it. So, I picked it up and read a few pages, and I guess I never put it down."
"It has that affect on me too."
"Really?"
"Yeah. I've read the book cover to cover more times than I could say."
"No kidding?"
"Yeah. I feel like I've carried it with me everywhere since high school."
"I used to be that way with e.e. cummings. His Complete Poems was kind of my poetic bible."
"Oh, I love Cummings," she says, reaching out and touching his hand. He almost pulls his hand away from the shock her touch sends through him. But then she pulls away as if she, too, were caught off guard by something moving through her. She looks up at him, "I mean, not as much as I love you," and then both of them look at each other, maybe a beat too long. "I mean, your work. Not as much as I love your work."
"Of course," he sputters. He looks at his watch, trying to figure out a way to pull his inclinations from the brink. "Sorry, Joelle, but I have a meeting with a colleague in just a few—"
"Oh, sorry. I'll just..." she says, standing a little too quickly from her chair and then sitting back down just as quickly. "I hope I didn't—"
"No, It was fine. I was happy to have the company, especially with someone who has such nice things to say about my work."
"Good," she says, and stands.
"You're welcome anytime."
"I might take you up on that."
"I hope you do." As he says this and she turns to him—half-surprised, half-excited—and opens the door to leave, he worries he's invited more trouble.
Something is happening between them. And he's not at all sure that he can stop it from happening, stop it from spinning away from him, like it nearly did just a minute ago.
No. He could stop it if he wanted to. He just won't want to. He likes the spinning too much. He likes being on the verge of losing control of his emotions. Even now, he is dizzy from the air of falling.
And he's already thinking of ways to get her to stay.
"Bye," she says, and looks at him one last time. Her eyes are so sweetly conflicted between heartbreak and wanting. It's been too long since someone has looked at him that way.
When she leaves, he stares at her chair, trying to bring back the ghost of her, wanting to hold the image of her in his head until he sees her again. But he won't bring her back. He will see flickers and quick glimpses of her face, a look, or a smile that'll fade too quickly. But he won't hold her.
He wonders if he ever will.
For several minutes he sits there staring at her chair, listening to the sound of his own heart beating, trying to catch his breath. And when he hears something out the door, he looks up and he can see her shadow hanging in the hall—still standing there—listening to her own heart, catching her own breath.
Later that afternoon, in his home office, Jacob is rummaging through some old papers. He's stumbled onto some longhand drafts of poems that would later end up in Imeros. Some of them were written hastily on napkins, or on the backs of flyers from various university events. He is amazed that he could ever be so casual about his writing, and sad that his life as a writer has become so much more formal, a routine that has become shaped by rigidity and superstition.
He wouldn't even consider writing a poem on a napkin now. The words have become so valuable to him that he can scarcely imagine misplacing them, or risk someone discarding them.
But, perhaps, this rigidity is what has penned him in. Maybe, t
his arbitrary value he's put on all words has put undue pressure on each word he tries to record, keeps him from just experiencing the world out loud with a weightless pen.
He digs deeper into the box where he'd found the early poems and comes across an old notebook, an old journal. As he shuffles through the pages, he realizes that this is the journal from the year he met Melissa. It's been so long since he's looked though this stuff. He's not sure if he's peeked into these old notebooks for more than ten years. Just the smell of flipping the pages immediately sends him back to her, and that old feeling—that swimming in the gut—returns, and he can hear those old noises circulate through his head again.
The first time he saw Melissa was his junior year at university. It was his first class—19th Century European Literature—of the winter quarter. And like the first day of any class, once you enter the classroom, you have to decide where to sit. Oftentimes, this is an important decision because chances are you will spend the remainder of the course in that spot. So, it is usually a strategic decision. You want to sit in a place that minimizes bad distractions, but wouldn't mind sitting in a friendly spot where the distractions don't seem like distractions—more like friendly asides to enhance the course's enjoyment.
When Jacob walked in that day, he remembers scanning the room, looking for a friendly face he could walk over to and strike up a conversation with, maybe someone familiar from previous English classes.
Then he saw her.
Jacob, even now, wouldn't describe seeing