AAA~Library Carrel

Third floor,
northwest corner
where no one thinks to look.

October 1968.

She claims it
with books she’ll never open,
builds walls
against the world’s weight,
its catalog of losses.

Her fingers find the groove
in old oak,
trace it like a prayer
while she memorizes Yeats.

The center cannot hold.

Anything but what waits outside
these walls.

The window holds October light
like amber.

She comes daily now.

Through November rain.

Through December snow.

She carves a heart,
small,
where wood meets metal frame.

Sits with it.

Empty.

Then, last day before Christmas break,
she adds initials—

S.M. ’68

inside.

A claim.

A cry.

Outside, the leaves
have long since fallen.

Five years pass.

October 1973.

He finds it
following sunlight,
this corner where the quiet lives.

Here, the world’s insistence
softens.

No one asking what he’ll become,
no measuring his life
against his father’s definitions.

He brings philosophy texts,
reads Yeats instead.

His thumb finds the groove
worn smooth by other thumbs,
other escapes.

October light, unchanged.

His fingers find
the small carved heart,
initials nested inside.

S.M. ’68.

He traces the heart’s outline,
imagines who needed
this silence then,
what weight they carried.

Adds his own below.

T.R. ’73.

Then, impulsive,
a small +
between her heart
and his letters.

A hope across five years.

October 2023.

Fifty years.

The stairs protest
her slower climb.

She finds it still there.

Her refuge,
smaller now than memory made it.

The same October light
through the same window.

Yeats on the shelf
like a promise kept.

Her fingers, spotted now,
find the groove.

Their old path home.

Then her heart.

Still there.

Faded but clear.

Below it, T.R. ’73.

And between them,
small but certain—

Her breath catches.

Someone had found her heart.

Then dared to answer it.

She traces both sets of letters,
imagines his fingers finding hers.

Considers who T.R. became.

Whether he found what he was seeking.

The space between their refuge-taking
electric with possibility.

All the conversations never had.

The paths that never crossed
except here,
in carved letters,
in shared silence.

She adds nothing new.

Leaves the conversation as it was.

Two young people speaking
across time’s brief gap.

Outside, October performs
its yearly work.

The carrel holds their words.

Their silence.

And the fifty years of space
between remembering.

Five years collapsed
into the width of a pencil mark.

Fifty years
into the pause between one breath
and the next.

The wood’s slow breathing.

Silence that remembers
how to hold a breaking heart.