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.