It's the only thing that makes sense right now.
Week four, I go back.
My mother drives me to UW. She hates that I want to get back. I tell her on a Tuesday morning that I'm going back on Thursday, and she looks at me for a long moment. She does three loads of my laundry. She packs food for my refrigerator. She drives to campus and carries things up to my room while I manage the stairs slowly, and she doesn't comment on how slowly I'm going.
When she leaves, she holds my face in her hands and looks at me.
"You call me," she says.
"I will."
"I’m serious. I will come. You don’t have to do this alone.”
I look at her.
"I’m here. I know more than you think I know," she says quietly. "I was in that waiting room for a long time."
I don't say anything.
She kisses my forehead, and she goes.
My dorm room is exactly as I left it.
Coat on the floor.
I stand in the doorway and look at it. The coat Beckett dropped off my shoulders the afternoon when he kissed me, and I kissed him back. I genuinely thought that what we had was something.
I pick the coat up and hang it on the hook behind the door.
I sit on my bed and look at the room.
I need it be mine again.
I return to my classes, and I go back to work at the café on Monday.
Jordan gives me the easier shifts without being asked. Counter work, no running. He doesn't ask questions, which is why I like him. Priya makes me laugh on my third shift back — something stupid about a customer's order — and the laugh comes out of me before I can decide whether I feel like laughing.
It feels strange.
Good strange.
I hold onto it.
I go to the library once.
I'm walking back from class on a Wednesday afternoon when my feet make the decision independently. I find myself in the third-floor political science section, standing in front of our carrel, before I've finished deciding to come here.
I sit down and put my bag on the table.
Then I search the shelves for the book.The Prince.
My heart races when I crack the spine and look at the margins. He returned it to the shelf.
His handwriting. Mine. The whole conversation we had across weeks of afternoons in this chair in this light. I look at it, and I feel it move through me — not cleanly, not simply, not in any way I can name in a single word.
I close the book.
I sit for a moment in the quiet of the third floor and think.
