She checks the returns cart. The lost-and-found shelf behind the desk. She disappears into the back for two minutes and comes back shaking her head. "Nothing matching that description. If someone found it, they might have re-shelved it — do you want me to check?"
"Please."
She's gone for five minutes.
She comes back empty-handed.
"Not on the shelf either. I'm sorry."
I thank her and walk back to my carrel, sit down, look at the empty table, and feel something move through me that I'm not prepared to name at seven in the morning.
The book is gone.
The annotations are gone. Every margin note, every argument, every response I left, and every response I found waiting — gone. Days of a conversation that was never supposed to be a conversation, between two people who were never supposed to be talking, and now it's just — absent. Like it didn't happen. Like I imagined, the whole thing, including the handwriting, I've been thinking about since the first time I found it.
I open my laptop.
Close it.
I pull out my notebook instead and uncap my pen and write at the top of a fresh page, not for the response paper, just because I need somewhere to put it:
What if it's just the symptom?
My own words back at me. The note I left. The question I've been turning over since I wrote it — not just as an academic argument, not just as a response to an annotation in a dead man's book — but as something that feels uncomfortably applicable to my own life if I look at it directly.
Power as symptom. Reach as symptom. The need to own things, control things, surveil things — all of it pointing back to something underneath. Something that predates the behavior. Something afraid.
I think about Cody's hand on my collarbone, where the pendant used to be.
I think about Judge Ravenshaw's face when Penelope said UW.
I think about sitting tied to a chair in the dark and a voice behind me saying,“You really didn't know.”
I press my pen harder against the page.
What if all of it is not about me at all? What if I've been moving through other people's symptoms this entire time, mistaking them for love, mistaking possession for devotion, mistaking the need to own something for the desire to cherish it?
Cody kept me because I was his.
Judge Ravenshaw managed me because I was a variable.
I look at the empty chair.
My pen is still against the page.
I write: The treatment becomes the disease.
I stare at that for a long moment.
That's not mine. That's from the book — from one of the annotations, near the back, a section I'd read three times because the handwriting was pressed harder there than anywhere else, like whoever wrote it was working something out in real time and needed the pen to keep up.
I have it memorized.
I close the notebook.
This is the problem. This is the specific, inconvenient, poorly-timed problem that I have been trying to manage since a stranger dropped a book on my desk and read my essay over my shoulder.
I am memorizing things that belong to someone I don't know.
