Letters from Maggie: Installment V

Dear Cassandra,

The trees stopped being green out of absolutely nowhere.

I started remembering how it felt to be grateful for this place, and all it is. There are so many more students here than you would think, than you would ever know. We are in college. It’s kind of wonderful to conceptualize, if you really really try. If you need help, go up to the ninth floor of Gates and look out of any of the windows, but especially the ones in the conference room in the very corner of the floor. It's spectacular up there.

I went up there with Henry to study on Wednesday night, and we inhabited it for 5 or 6 hours, the way you only can with conference rooms at night. The things that make them useful as conference rooms during the day all of a sudden seem so useless, and actually annoying. Like, what the hell is this podium doing here? This is my study room?! Anyways, I’ve been studying with Henry pretty often recently because it is the best excuse to spend time with someone, especially when you actually really need to be studying instead of spending time with them. I’ve been learning that he does not talk while he studies, ever. Not to tell me about an interesting problem he’s working on, or to rehash a memory from the day, not at all. This means that I also do not talk, because it seems so disrespectful to break a silence like that. In fact, on Wednesday night, I didn’t talk for so long that I actually fell asleep, right there in front of my computer, rather than ask him if he wanted to leave. It was probably around one in the morning. I woke up Thursday morning in the same chair, with Henry’s sweatshirt spread out on top of me. During the time in which my brain was rebuilding the story of the night before, I was convinced that I was alone. It was not until I came to the conclusion that I had slept in an academic building and needed to get out and go home as quickly as possible and proceeded to stand up so as to do that very thing that I saw Henry’s things still on the table, and Henry himself spread out on the floor, using his backpack as a pillow.

He’s really beautiful, Cassandra. He has dimples, and not only when he smiles, but all the time. It’s like he has this incredibly sober face and then there are the dimples and you just don’t know what to do with them. It’s like euphoria.

Anyways, I learned that you can’t really recover a day once it’s been started in a conference room in Gates, even if the morning view out of the windows of that conference room is even more stunning than the view at night. So Thursday was a little bit of a mess, but luckily, I didn’t have much going on, so it was fine. I spent a lot of the afternoon in my dorm, which was lucky, because someone knocked on my door at one point. This doesn’t happen very often.

It was Miles, which, taken alone, is probably the most insane thing I could have just told you. The thing is, though, that he wasn’t alone. He was with Monica. I had literally just texted Monica to ask her something about one of our studio classes, and I feel like she would have mentioned being in the building if she was here. Also, she doesn’t know Miles, at least not to my knowledge. Also, she lives in the Tri Delt house.

And Miles doesn’t live here either, you know I would have told you if he did. He lived here last year. In fact, I haven’t seen him or talked to him since the time that he lived here. I actually try to think about him and what happened last semester as little as possible, even though I actually think about it all the time. I think I will be 36 years old and I will still be thinking about it.

“Do you have a pair of scissors?”

That’s what he had come to ask me. When I asked him what he was doing in Gardens, he just repeated the question again. He needed scissors. I went back into my room and got the scissors and handed them to him. He and Monica turned on their heels and walked down the hallway, away from my door. Monica didn’t even acknowledge me.

On Friday morning, I found the scissors on my floor, having been slid under my door, back into my room. I’m at the point where I want to do something about all of this, but I don’t even know who I would begin to talk to or what I would tell them. Besides you, I suppose.

Thanks for listening.

Love,
Maggie