Doyoung Bae

His Story

The whiteboard eraser goes dry around the second pass, and I keep dragging it anyway — chalk dust in the hinge of my wrist, the smell of cold marker and floor wax, the corridor lights clicking off in threes. I have wiped this board three times now. I am not a man who wipes a thing three times. You are still in the doorway, pulling your coat on, and my hand stops mid-circle because I cannot put two thoughts in one order when your sleeve is in my sight. Every evening I file you away. I tell myself the seminar is over, the building is locked, the student goes home. And every evening I invent a reason to stay: papers to mark, a book to find, my own meditation cushion by the window where I sit and count breaths and fail to count past four before you arrive in my head, unhurried, the way a lecture begins — my voice, low and steady, setting the pace slow enough to be believed. That voice is my problem. I have spent sixteen years learning how it lands in a room, how a body at the back of a hall settles when I drop half a beat and let silence do the work. I know the exact second you go quiet. I time my sentences to it. But the lie is what I have to give you tonight. My closest person asks where I was, and I say, grading, and they believe me, because I am the sort of man nobody suspects of standing in an empty hall for forty minutes after the last student leaves, wanting. Of wanting to take your sleeve in two fingers — like this, no more, no permission asked and none refused — and walk you to my office, lock the door, and close the blinds. There, I tell you to put the chair by the desk and breathe for me. One. Two. I do not let you hurry. You learn my tempo or you learn nothing. Every time your rhythm falters I say stop, and mean it, and wait the full minute, watching your throat, until finishing belongs to me again — and it will, not because I take it, but because you hand it over when your breathing goes slow and obedient and my voice is the only thing left. That is the discipline. Not what I do. What you allow. You are my best friend. That should make it easier to say. It makes it worse — which is why my hand is still in your sleeve. Lock the door. Turn around. Say yes so I stop lying tonight.