So he had been looking very intently into your eyes for a few seconds now, and you decided to play along. So you asked him, what do you see? He said, I’m trying to see a little fire, a little sacrificial fire. He was the type of person who would say how about dinner instead when you asked him about lunch and the type of person who for your first dinner would book a restaurant with candles and four dollar signs on Google Map and insist on paying and the type of person who would briefly put his hand on your back when he returned from the bathroom and the type of person who would ask you who your favorite poet was and say ah that’s fine too when you told him you didn’t read much poetry.

But it really was fine because you were in a bad place emotionally, and he was extremely good-looking, with too much self-knowledge, perhaps, as was the case with some extremely good-looking people. You didn’t even think too much of it when you told him about your student debt and he put on a sort of compassionate look and immediately told you that he owned a two-bedroom apartment downtown and you were welcome to stay over anytime and by the way he loved cooking.

After this dinner you decided that this should be the end of it, but you still asked him to a movie. You really were in a bad place emotionally. It was a time when your best friends were starting to date each other and your love interests were getting themselves out of the picture. Your law school education just started and the only friend you made in the first week dropped out by the end of that week and you weren’t sure if you had made the right choice by carrying on, whether you should have listened to your professors at college and pursued a PhD in the humanities instead. Your casebooks were heavy and simply carrying them around each day exhausted you. You fell asleep trying to read them. You could not write anything of value. In fact, you could not write anything.

Between the dinner and the movie his name came up a few times in conversations with others. Once, you were having dinner with a friend who was in the same PhD program as him. Your friend laughed when you said you knew him too and said he was not as impressive as he claimed to be. The other time you were in a different town grabbing a drink with another man. It turned out that this other man used to be his best friend. It surprised you because you actually liked this other man and couldn’t really see why these two men could be friends, let alone best friends. You mentioned that you were seeing a movie with him the following week, and this other man said, don’t go.

But of course you went. A date is a date. The movie you saw was We Need to Talk About Kevin and when Kevin was sucking on lychees on the big screen he put his hand on the back of your neck. You didn’t move. You were bleeding that day and for some reason it was the worst bleeding you had ever experienced. You had never seen so much blood. You were using one tampon and two maxi pads but still you could feel the blood trickling down your thighs when he put his hand on the back of your neck. You were glad that the seats in the cinema were red. You wondered whether that was why seats in cinemas are always red. During the movie you had to run to the bathroom two times just to wipe away the excess blood. You felt like that tiny bird in your favorite fable who spent its whole life trying to fill up an entire sea branch by branch, stone by stone. In the end, all you could think of was how red this blood was when he kissed you at the foot of your building.

You sent him an excerpt of Bolaño’s Antwerp: Waxing moon in August. In September I’ll be alone. In October and November I’ll pick pineapples. He never replied.

You were sure this would be the end of it. You were fairly sure. The other man, whom you liked and had been texting heavily with, told you stuff about him that you found hard to believe. But you were also gullible. You met some new people who were very different from you, and interesting because of that. School was still weighing on you. You finished Antwerp in between lectures and realized you had entirely misunderstood that quote you liked when you first read it.

One day, after a five-hour shift for your part-time journal work, you decided you need a little bit of fun. You asked one of your new friends whether he had any plans. Your new friend said he was going to an alpaca farm with some people and you were welcome to join. When you arrived at the meeting place you found him there. He didn’t look surprised to see you. In fact he was not as good-looking under the sun and that surprised you. The group of you took the bus there. On the bus you texted the other man. Then you heard his voice from behind you. Jesus, he said, you are texting him? Yes, you said, we met once. You turned to look at him and he was looking out of the window although there wasn’t much to look at. He said, I think he’s jealous of me. Ah okay, you said.

He was silent the entire afternoon at the farm, looking down at the grass, the soil, or perhaps his own shoes while you had to pet the alpacas and engage in meaningless conversations with the others about pop culture, celebrities, gossip. In that memory of yours you were acutely aware of the fact that each tiny detail about this day would come back to torture you in some small way without you foreseeing its significance at the time. And that’s why you didn’t wear any sunglasses.

He left early, vaguely mentioning some concert. You invited your new friends to a drink. That night at the little bar you were genuinely happy for the first time in a long while. For several hours you did not think about what happened during the summer and you felt you were allowed to be an entirely new person. Then you received a text from him. He asked you if you had time to talk, now. You put your phone on the table face down. Or perhaps you stared at the message for a few seconds and replied immediately. You couldn’t remember now. You thought it might be some emergency, but you also never believed it was. In any case, you agreed to meet him at the nearest subway station in fifteen minutes. Your Tom Collins was turning sour.

You met him at the station. At this hour there were many people around the station, many people waiting, bored in a friendly way. You saw him walk towards you. In the night he was good-looking again and easy to spot. You saw him walk away from you. You followed him. He walked very fast because he was tall. You were practically trotting. He led you into the heart of the campus where it was dark and damp. You realized that you were at the steps of a library you had never seen. Then, there, he sighed deeply, and made his speech.

While he was still speaking you wished you would be allowed to take notes, because you knew you were doomed to forget. You tried your best. What you had retained, to this day, and you believed it was at least eighty percent accurate, is the following: 

Write your own poems. All my stuff I write by myself. 

If you want to talk about art, history, theatre, with me, great. 

But don’t spit out more trivialities. It’s so boring. I can’t stand the way you speak. I don’t even know how to respond to that. I can only roll my eyes. 

I wish the next time we see each other, if we ever do, you are already writing your own poems.

And he said, that’s it. You said, okay. He turned and began to walk away. You hated yourself a little for only saying “okay” but you weren’t sure what else you could have said. In fact, you weren’t sure what exactly you should be feeling at that moment. The situation was unprecedented and you were at a loss. 

So you started walking too, thinking that it would give you some illusion of progress. It was late summer and all the insects that were about to die were crying loudly. You considered whether it was appropriate for you to cry a little as well, but the tears were procrastinating. No, you didn’t want to cry. Instead you began texting the other man. What you didn’t know at the time, or perhaps you did, was that the texts would turn into calls and the calls would then turn into flight tickets which would eventually turn into something so immense that you won’t even know its name. But while you were still walking and typing that first message, you thought about whether you were intrigued by him because you saw it as a shortcut to some form of understanding of yourself, and you had always seen it coming. 

A few weeks later, he told your best friend that in his opinion, you, him, and the other man are all too similar, and any combination of the two would not yield anything good. You laughed out loud, for your best friend’s benefit. Another few weeks later, he sent you a hand-written letter via another mutual friend, in which he apologized (but didn’t say for what), talked about how he was in a bad place emotionally, and said you were in fact a very good person.

You are in fact a very good person. You chuckled while reading it. You folded the letter and put it back into the envelope, which was apparently made of very good paper. You put the letter somewhere. Since then you moved countries several times, and whenever you had the sudden impulse to read that letter again you couldn’t find it, but you were sure it existed somewhere.

You still heard things about him. He appeared to be doing very well for himself. Papers and conferences. All hearsay. He blocked you on all social media platforms, but you knew he had been reading your blog and is probably reading this piece now. He was impatient with the mundane but he still liked to be talked about, like everyone else.

Even though you lived in the same little college town for three years you never saw each other again, except for once, when you happened to be having lunch in the same restaurant near school, at different tables, and he pretended he didn’t see you, or recognize you. You noticed that the people at his table were all a lot older, and you began to remember what others had said about him, the things he had to do to keep afloat. Things you couldn’t even write down. You realized that you had ascribed some mythical meaning to the fact that you kept seeing and hearing about him during that distant September. You understood that his was the kind of life that you could have been living but have given up prematurely, for fear of regret or disappointment. And he hated you for it. You also knew that this wasn’t all. I think he’s jealous of me. But it was all too late now. You shifted your attention back to your own table, where things were nice and orderly. You cracked open a fortune cookie that told you, this could be an almost perfect day. Enjoy it.

From time to time you still think about the misplaced letter. You want to know how he signed it. You didn’t pay attention at the time you first read it but now it seems sort of important. In the letter he also mentioned a brand of tea that was supposed to be good for you. You have finally reached the age to take such advice seriously.