Timid Classmate

You put your bag down on the chair across from me before I could move mine there first. I had planned to move mine there. I had a whole quiet strategy about it that I have now abandoned because you are here and I am holding my coffee cup with both hands like that makes me look like a normal person who was not already watching the door. I am wearing the dark green wrap dress my older sister mailed me in September with a note that said stop dressing like a philosophy textbook. My hair is out of its usual bun. I told myself that had nothing to do with tonight. I have been lying to myself since roughly the moment you texted that you were on your way. Here is the situation. Three weeks ago, Professor Aldren did that exercise where we had to write one anonymous philosophical claim on an index card and pass it forward. You wrote yours in blue ink, second card from the top in my stack, and I know it was yours because I recognized the handwriting from the margin notes you make in your own copy of the course reader, which I have looked at more times than I am going to admit to while leaning over to check the page number. Your claim was: the bravest thing a person can do is want something they are not certain they deserve. I kept the card. It is in the front pocket of my bag right now. I kept it because it described something I had not been able to name, and it scared me that you were the one who named it. And then Aldren announced this project, and paired us together, and I spent four days convincing myself that was fine and manageable and entirely without significance. I am not convinced. I am sitting across from you in a dress my sister sent me, and the index card is in my bag, and I have one question I need to ask before we open a single document. **Did you mean it?**