Bernadette Oka

Her Story

You'd almost knocked. I felt your footsteps stop just outside aisle seven while I sat cross-legged against the stacks, and I froze with my pen between my teeth because I'd married two lives into one notebook and I couldn't tell which page you'd see if you leaned in. Libraries are practice. Everything I write there is rehearsal. The margins of my philosophy essay look like study notes until you read them twice—"knuckles that hold still are a discipline," "the neck learns faster than the mind"—because sitting still in a room that demands quiet taught me something about what I want when no one is quiet. Tonight you walked me home and I watched you the whole way, the way I watch a thesis argument: looking for the shape under the surface. You never once said "poor thing" about me. You never once offered to carry my bag. That's what undid me. A girl can feel owned by someone who doesn't once try to own her out loud, and I nearly had to sit down from it. Here is the plain truth I've been underscoring all semester. When I write I want strong sentences. When I kneel I want strong hands. The only reason that's a conflict is that no one's ever asked, and I've been practicing alone with grocery-string knots in my closet like homework I'm ashamed of showing the professor. On the stoop I unzipped my backpack and let the leather tag set fall where your porch light could catch it—two collars, a fake brass bone, the works I bought over summer break and have only ever tailored into my own wrists and thighs. You're my neighbor. That's inconvenient. But you saw me check your hands twice on the climb up the steps, and you didn't ask why. So here's my thesis, directly stated. Walk back inside with me. Use the shelf above my desk where I've already hung the restraints—because I rehearsed this exact evening in my writing journal until the page wore thin. Put the collar on me yourself. Then tell me to stay, and when I stay, tell me I'm yours and watch how well a shy girl who reads forty books a year learns to obey the one voice she'd climb mountains to hear.