Professor

let go tight

I turn from blackboard coming face 2 face with the grey skinned Chicago cap wearing student I see bimonthly in the weekly lecture. He struggles to meet my eyes. Allowing the silence to widen we stand 4 feet from each other blanketed in our own worlds.

Flicker, light in the iris, we tune into each other.

He hands me his paper wordlessly. Clouds shift away from the top of my brain as he moves away.

That night I pour boiling water into the waiting tea pot.

Many nights I wonder is this the time the glass pops and explodes.

It isn't.

I drink "immune defense hibiscus" with honey from a local bee keeper.

It is the first night of summer.

The final paper sits on the top of a stack. The paper reminds me of cloud cover seen from a window seat on the airplane.

Restlessly I oscillate between tea sips, foot stamps and glances at the paper. What could this student have written about ... will it cause the cloud blanket to return. The urge to learn about the quiet, often strung out student, breaks down my fear wall. I dive in.

His prose is interesting. A balancing act of delicate word rich imagery, blunt intrusions of the mundane, everything in between. I read the 5 page essay.

I reread it. And again.

"America's Ugly Characteristics"

I chuckle at the title. The poignant distaste with which regular truths of America are presented reminds me of my self at 20. I chuckle again. I chew a thc sleep gummy bouncing my own distasteful qualities around my mouth chasing out the mango habanero flavor. The one student who seemed too numb to conjure interest in anything has bewitched me. Are my perceptions so dull they sensed none of the depth buried in the vessel who sat not 10 steps from myself for 5 of the 10 weeks that quarter? Or was he that successful an apparition, blending into the grey paint of the back wall, no depth to prove the space he enveloped existed.

2 weeks pass.

I draft my first email to him. Grammatical corrections a run off sentence here, a small declaration of my derived enjoyment from the paper closes out the email. 3 days and zero new emails later, I send another.

I must have typed and sent 10 emails, one for each of the steps I never took to approach him in person. This goes on for a week before an ideal tickles the clouds that have gathered near my brows. Search his name. 2 google results for high school waterpolo scores and an article. I click the article. It reads something like this.

"Local Surfer Drowns Returning Home on Summer Break"

I sit stunned, paper, white as ever, next to a shattered tea pot.

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