At Duffy’s: Male, Black hair.

You were playing darts. I was sitting at the table, the one that rocks slightly because the base is broken. I cheered you on silently, though I couldn’t see the score through Rick’s beard. The first time I saw you was in the Caf. It was steak night and you had three steaks on your plate, the meat sort of gray at the edges. I don’t eat steak, but I liked you any way, the way you turned the spoon towards me for my convenience. I almost put some on my plate, just to impress you. We could have bonded over it. “Hey, you eat steak, I eat steak too! What a coincidence.” If it weren’t for the color, reminiscent of something starting to rot, I could’ve done it, just for you. I didn’t see you again until that night at Duffy’s. I say that night at Duffy’s as if it were something exceptional, but you would’ve described it as mundane. To you it would’ve been just another drunk night at Duffy’s. It is possible that in the morning, you didn’t remember you went to Duffy’s at all, it was just another drunk night. How could you remember me, sitting there with my pitcher? I wasn’t there alone, I would never be there alone. I had a friend sitting across the table, but how ineffectual she seemed, completely unaware of your presence. I did see her turn around once or twice and glance towards the dartboard. Maybe she too was looking in your direction. I wouldn’t describe myself as a violent person, but I would fight her for you. We could set up a ring in the quads, fill it with mud, practice for the mud pit in the spring. I think you and your friends would enjoy watching this, the two of us fighting over you, our shirts muddy and ripped and falling off. How dirty would I have to get for you to be mine? At one point in the night we both went to refill our pitchers at the same time. I thought of things I could say, “Hey, you drink beer, I drink beer too! What a coincidence.” I could have asked you about your game of darts, I could have asked to bum a cigarette, though I didn’t even know your name. Instead I just asked for my pitcher to be refilled. I stared at you until you left. I held out hope that you were just going for a cigarette, but when you didn’t return five, ten minutes later I knew it was too late. I went out the back door just in case you were still standing there and I could bump into you, but the alley was empty. I went to the Broadview and ate eggs, as if that were a replacement for anything.

At poetry workshop: Male, Brunette.

You came into the class and I thought, oh god, not you. You sat across from me on one of those red chairs in the Common Room. Of course you would sit there. The whole class I wasn’t sure whether or not you were staring at me or simply looking at the dull paintings of old men hanging on the wall. It is entirely agonizing to spend four and a half hours wondering if someone is staring at you. Then when it came time to workshop your poems, that was the worst. It was all I could do to keep from calling out, “These poems are great! Why are they not already published? Do not change a precious word. We should get rid of Catch and replace it entirely with you, you and your words. Your picture can be on the cover. You with a cigarette hanging out of your mouth, you alone writing, you sitting outside.” Instead I criticized you brutally, insulting every line break and word choice until there was nothing left. “Scrap the poem,” I concluded. “Start over. Write a new one.” I imagined you going back to your room (if only I knew where it was, I thought of lingering after class to watch where you walked, but it was too tempting, too far) and crying on your lofted bed while your political science major roommate was off playing beer pong. I imagined you, sitting amongst a mess of books. Sitting in a pile of words, that is how you must live. I want to live in the words with you. I want to be swallowed whole by your fragments and become such a perfect line break.

At Post Lobby, Friday night: Female, Blonde.

Turn the items off. Raise the stock to five. The only time I’ve ever touched you is with a tap of the B button, though I have to remind myself that on that screen is not you, that there, standing next to what is not you, is not me. They are pixels in our likenesses, or what we would like our likenesses to be. Sometimes I play innocent and naïve, a baseball cap on my head and a yo-yo in my hand. Other times I pull up on a motorcycle, crude and tasteless, to see if that’s what you’re into. You never know who I’ll appear as next; still searching for who I am to you. Show me what you see when you turn your head to the left and look at me. I look at your torn jeans and tattoos and wonder what it is that makes you don that same pink dress, that same crown night after night. We leap from building to building, across chasms. We dodge fast cars and laser beams. We grab each other by the shoulders and throw, tangling ourselves up with every toss. I watch the percentage by your name at the bottom of the screen rise, and I dread the fifth time you disappear from the screen, the match over too soon, for these are the only ways I know to bring you close: a dance of wave dashing, of double jumping, of ledge guarding. Tonight I played moustache to your matriarch, lost to you for the first time, a role unfamiliar to me, but worth it to see you suppress a smile. I would give you flowers if we hadn’t prevented their falling from the sky. I would give you my heart in a container. When the game is off, I try not to imagine myself running across a two-dimensional platform towards you, but I can see you bring your shield up, can feel my fist connect with it. The phantom pains when I finally set down the controller. Someday I will leap over rocks and ferns and pick all the mushrooms I find. I will enter your dorm room with its magma colored carpet. I will hope your roommate does not tell me that you are in another place, somewhere else, but I will play on, through all the worlds it takes to get to you.

At the Pub Office: Female, Brunette.

I’d love to be the string wrapped around your finger. I’d love for you to watch me drop and bring me winding back to you in one fluid motion. When I read the packets our professor hands out weekly, I spend the most time on the pages with your name in the header. I hole up in the flood-damaged Wallace Lounge or, when it isn’t too cold, on the roof of Seymour. I dismantle the words you’ve split into verse, reassemble them: into the stories you’ve told me about your term abroad, into the streaks of color in your hair, into the shape of a cross. We speak in bold type. We talk out of turn. We sit on opposite sides of the Caf, but waves of your laughter bounce off of the still life bowls of fruit and the flies they attract, over the double bass drum blaring from the speaker in the ceiling, and into my ears, and when I hear that laugh, I feel as though I have heard the joke you told, and I laugh too. I see you reading on the Gizmo Patio and wonder what stories you would carve into the ice if we were still able to skate here. In the flood-damaged Wallace Lounge, I tear off a piece of the peeling wallpaper and write one of your poems on the back. On the roof of Seymour, I shred your words and watch as sparrows take them for their nests. After your meeting, call me over. We’ll lock the office door. We’ll print page after page of poems, hang them from the ceiling, tape them to the walls. Siphon out so much of ourselves until we feel what it is to be refracted, like light into compound eyes. We’ll sleep on the couch and only wake when the student newspaper staff knocks; they need to have their Monday meeting. On the train back to your little pocket of Chicago, do you fog the window with your breath and write my name? With you, I would bind every book we’d ever read, I would read every book we’d ever burn, and I would burn every book. To keep you warm, to spell your name out in smoke.

At the prairie: Female, Brunette.

There used to be a bench here, I swear. I scan the ground for indentations where it once stood, look around for any sign of where someone may have moved it. You do not believe me, but it’s true: I sat in it last weekend and watched a hot air balloon drift over Seymour until it was obscured by the skeletons of trees. If the bench were still here, maybe we could sit on it, but I’m not sure that is something I would want, I am not sure I would give up this scene: us, lying on the grass, watching the sky as it rusts, feeling those first few raindrops and cursing under our breath, but neither one of us making the move to leave. Neither of us is sure how we ended up here, couldn’t remember where we going in the first place. Walked through a sea of fog and came out here, where once there was a bench. I noticed you long before we ever talked, saw the way you danced, heard your laugh, inescapable. When we met, I was surprised at your shyness. Yes, there are nights where you clutch a forty and break into apartments, where you and I wander looking for a new way to make the world spin. But there are also other nights, the ones you spend building Roman houses, nights when you speak little. Those nights, I ask what you will plant in the peristylium. I place my hand on your leg and ask you to describe the placement and shape of the columns in the atrium. I ask if I can visit one day, when you have finished construction, and you turn back to your blueprints and tell me I will have to enter through the posticum, so no one watching will be able to see my arrival. Architect, open up. Let the light in. Tonight there are no houses, there is no bench. There is just the prairie, its tall grass rustling with the latest rumors, the footprints of flamingos still visible in the dirt. We look out at the flatness of this state, those cornfields crosshatched by trains, and you tell me of the snow-covered mountains you glide down at home, while I trace my name on your arm like I’m signing a cast, like I’m carving into stone.

At Knox PostSecret: Female, Brunette.

Listen. You, yes you. I have been reading your secrets, the digital postcards you send, though of course they are not secrets anymore, not a one. It is necessary to reveal secrets for the same reason it is necessary to release the fireflies you catch in a jar: you must keep them alive. To watch your secrets ride wind away from your breath, to see them drop and burrow into the ground, azaleas sprouting from the same spot a year later, or to see them pulled up into the sky, like snowflakes too light to land, is to see yourself, an image clearer than any mirror, the sharpest photograph. I’ll send you my secrets and you will hang them up, line your walls with them, until magazine cut words hurriedly collaged into the shape of my voice fall to the floor in piles, the story of the room obscured by mine. Let’s leave the lights on tonight. Let’s make a list of everyone we’ve ever loved and why, the number of kisses we’ve stolen, because what is a kiss if not a secret told to another set of lips? Let’s peel the wallpaper from the place you sleep in your parents’ house until we get to the very first layer, let’s trace our fingers along the seashell print and learn the story of the room, the dreams of the person who lived here first, the longing she had for the ocean. Tell me the story of that room in your ribcage, sing me that song stuck in your throat. Let me read the sestina that lies between your shoulder blades. Tell me who you are. Tell me who. Tell me. Let’s sit. Let’s set up a canvas and paint a world where everyone wears their secrets on their sleeves, where the worst and best things they have ever done can be read easily on their palms. And in this world, in the darkest nights, we will curl close to each other and whisper to one another, not secrets, for we know all of those here, from the night I spent shivering alone in the woods down to the last words you told the man you believed to be your father. Instead, we tell each other the only things we don’t know about one another: lies. And with every untruth, every falsehood, every discrepancy, we learn what our most telling secrets could never show us. We scratch out the names on our student IDs. We take the money. We run.

At the beer pong table: Female, Black hair.

This is a familiar sight: you, across the table from me, taking your first shot, making it. “It’s all in the wrist,” you say, as I aim. I can feel my pulse quicken, and I wonder, if you were to look close, if you would see in that soft spot on my wrist all the things I think about you, all the times I have imagined walking over to your side, brushing your hair behind your ear and whispering something no one else in the room could hear over the drunken ambling conversation and stereo boom. But the top of this table is a distance too far to cross. I make a shot, and I watch the curve in your fingers as they wrap around the red cup. We once spent dizzy nights together in your lofted bed, but that was a long time ago—not even sure if you remember the glances we traded across the Caf, the dirty texts we sent enumerating all the places around campus we wanted to find each other unclothed. You lift the side of your shirt up, just an inch, to distract me, and it does, because you show me your hip and I remember how that hip felt, I drink the next cup you make and taste not the drink but you. Our trash talk is getting slurred, and yet, the way you shoot, it is still as though you are dancing, graceful and carefree. I miss the table completely, my arm feels as though it is turning to stone at your gaze. I imagine being your partner, you standing beside me. The celebratory hugs we would share after a win. The cold laps we would run together after losing. Instead we have this, a map unfolded in front of us that we cannot traverse to find our way back to each other: the rings of water, miles of ocean. The racks, mountains. If we could send letters in ping pong balls the way we send messages in bottles, maybe you would know all this, and maybe you could write back. I watch as the cups dwindle, knowing that when it is over, my interaction with you will cease until the next time we find ourselves on opposite ends of this table, or a different one in the apartments, or another in the basement of a fraternity house. Rerack your cups in the shape of my heart. I still have a rebuttal.