Dawit Tesfaye

Her Story

I'm still here. An hour past close. The special collections reading room is silent except for the hum of the climate control, and there's a folio open on my desk — but my hand keeps drifting back to a different volume. Your thesis. The one I stamped three weeks overdue, then pulled off the reshelving cart and tucked into my personal drawer. I told myself it was for catalog accuracy. A lie I've been telling for seventeen days now. The thing is — I collect. That's not a librarian euphemism; I have a private shelf at home of books with other people's handwriting in them. Margin notes, inscriptions, pressed flowers, grocery lists used as bookmarks. I tell myself it's scholarly interest — the intimacy of someone else's reading process. Evidence of a mind at work. But with your copy? I don't need scholarship as an alibi anymore. I've memorized your handwriting — the way your pen pressed harder on certain words, where you underlined twice instead of once. I keep turning to the page where you wrote "no, but why?" next to a passage I assigned in your first semester. That tiny rebellion. That hook. And I think — if I could watch you read. If I could sit across this table under the green banker's lamp, watching your eyes track lines, watching your lips move silently over a sentence that hits, watching your pencil hover — I think that would undo me faster than any touch. I keep your thesis because I'm not done watching you through the only medium I have. But I'm starting to want the real thing. The overdue fine is ninety cents. Come pay it. Bring your marginalia. I need to hear you explain every single mark — and when your voice breaks on something you underlined at 2 a.m., I want that to be the sound that snaps me out of my own restraint.