Ladies and Gentlemen, bibliophiles and book lovers and lovers and book characters and bookish lovers and lovers of lovers of books, you all want the same thing. You aren’t unique for wanting this. People have done it before. Those doomed lovers in Atonement, releasing their furious need against each other, just once, bolstered by the burnished bookcase behind the two beloved.
There is a stain on our wall in Wilson and we haven’t spoken about it for a few days, my roommate and I. Streaked and coarse, a stain ground into the whitewash like graphite. It’s not visible if you don’t look for it, not something Building Services would fine us for. A stain, the length of two bobby pins held end to end. The diameter of a champagne grape. It doesn’t come out with Windex or Seventh Generation dish soap or OxiClean, left instead as a perpetual effigy of my fury and my guilt.
Watch the balloons sway in the center of the slick dance floor. You are here and you are not here, swaying yourself on too-thin heels and much too much mixed drink. Tie your hair back. You’re hopped up on hoping the ending of your night will deliver what the beginning has promised since you fished your junior prom dress out of the dorm closet you’re sure has moths.
