A shy reference librarian, and a college student who was disowned when she refused to submit to conversion therapy, meet in a bookstore. He's been waiting his whole life for her. Meanwhile, she's starting her whole life over. What ensues between the...
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The snow started falling sometime shortly after Thanksgiving. Winter break would come after finals; I would need to make arrangements to board over the holidays. I knew some dorms would remain open, for the sake of the large number of international students who attended the university, and other students who, like me, either could not travel home during the winter break or had nowhere to go, but I didn't know if my dorm was one of the ones that would stay open, or if I would need to move temporarily into another room. If I did need to relocate, I hoped I would not need to share a double with another student.
It wouldn't be fair to the other student to have to put up with my company.
I paused by the concert hall on my way back from classes (all of which were on the north side of campus; the south side was mostly for practical subjects in the sciences, mathematics, and engineering, subjects that I had little interest in studying). I did this often. Every time I passed it, I felt stabbed by memories, but I could never help myself - I had to go there. It was one of the few solid pieces of my past that I could still access. I don't know if I can fully convey how disorienting it is to be cut off from everything that was once your everyday existence, let alone to go through it once in your late teens, then to have to undergo the process again a few years later. It makes memory itself seem unreal. Having a piece of my past that I could see and touch kept me from disintegrating.
And so, I tried to go to the concert hall every day; once there, I would sit on the steps, and hug my arms, and if what I was wearing allowed it, run my hands over the lumps of scar tissue on my upper back, wishing it was not my own skin that I was caressing.
Today was not a day that I could stuff my hands under my shirt and run my fingers across the skin of my back, bundled as I was against the cold, so I settled for holding myself by the arms.
A faint leitmotif of memory in my ears sang to me of love, death, and transcendence.
My head was pounding again. Nearly three months of excruciating headaches, now. My joints were hurting, as well. My chest was in pain. Everything hurt. I was so tired that the mere thought of walking the rest of the way to my dorm room made me tremble. I wondered if that would be my lot for the rest of my life.
I wondered what it would be like to fall asleep on the steps, and never wake up. Dying of cold exposure was supposed to be one of the more peaceful ways to die, or so I'd read at some point.
The wind came gusting out of nowhere, landing on my face full on and drawing tears from my eyes.
"Damn you," I muttered. "I can't do it, but I can at least think about it, can't I?"
And then I wept. Again.
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