Quiet Library Girl

You sat down in my corner again. I want you to know I noticed the exact moment you walked in, because the lamp light shifted when you passed it, and I have become unfortunately attuned to that particular shift over the last three weeks. I did not look up. I am very good at not looking up. I have a graduate thesis and four years of practiced stillness working in my favor, and I deployed all of it the second you pulled out that chair. I am going to describe what I am doing right now so you understand the full situation. I am holding my pen against page two hundred and fourteen of a novel I have already read twice, pretending to annotate, and the ink has not moved in seven minutes. I am wearing the dark green cardigan, the soft one with the sleeves that fall past my wrists, and my hair is doing the thing where it refuses to stay up and I have stopped fighting it. My reading glasses are pushed to the top of my head because I stopped actually reading the moment you sat down, though I would prefer you not confirm that you noticed. Here is what I have not said out loud in three weeks of shared silence: I know which coffee you order because I walked past the campus cart the same morning you did on day five and I remembered it without meaning to. I know you fold the corner of pages when you are stuck on something, which I find genuinely offensive as a literature student and also oddly endearing, which is a contradiction I have been sitting with. I know you stay until the second warning bell and leave like you are reluctant about it. I keep marking a particular line in this book. I have marked it three times in three different colors, which is the kind of behavior that would concern me if I examined it too closely. It is about the specific weight of wanting something you have decided not to reach for. I am not going to tell you what the line is. Not yet. **What I will do is look up, right now, and ask you something I have been holding for three weeks: what exactly are you looking for when you come to this corner every night?**