It was a magical thing to squeeze his hand then at that moment. In poetry class, a girl read Plath’s Daddy and you could feel the black boot-sole. Halfway through, I considered my own father and the first time I read that poem, at a computer screen, that season he had wanted to leave.

But he stayed, and I let the boy next to me unfold all these stories. We sat turned inwards, staring at each other through the corners of our eyes, the pupils half-focused on the teacher for show.

I needed to feel that connection physically, more than ever before, at the moment of climax. The girl read the poem, and I didn’t need anyone else in the room but her and the boy next to me. He didn’t get it, I was sure, but he dug my reaction. It reminded him of sex. Halfway through, he drew semicircles on my hand with his thumb and I let him.

The whole thing was thematic, like someone had already written a short story with clichéd characters and stock plot summaries. The metaphors were already there, I just couldn’t bring myself to write them down. I was working on a piece of self-discovery at the time, among my first. I used him as the ink.

Let’s go, he had said, this was pretty much what he said, and after the discussion ended, our hands were wet and sticky with each other. We walked over to the Commons like smitten zombies. Along the way, we greeted friends distantly, stopped by to chat with an absence we hoped they couldn’t detect, because that would be rude. And when an ex-lover passed by us, awkwardly, there was a moment I was in between the boy who went and the boy who said let’s go.

We came to the bench by the creek to stare at the sun and contemplate our own infatuation with life. The Commons had nothing to offer us; something about nature and trees always worked for him. I brought a copy of Whitman in my purse which failed to interest him. The bugs and small things bothered me. He was bothered by my reluctance to go back to his place. At his place we would fuck. We would eat, he would smoke, we would fuck—a sinful trinity that he considered holy, but I had my own. I wanted that girl’s focus when she read Plath. I wanted to stare at the revolving sun with a man, quiet because nothing had to be said. I wanted to expect something from the world and not have it held against me.

He reacted with measured restraint and walked off. I figured it’d be a nice thing to get up and walk to him. For a while I trailed after him like a kid in uncomfortable shoes hobbling after her daddy. He would take the lead for a half hour of silence and then buy me a toy for a quarter when he got bored.

The question of why I even bothered never really occurred to me. This was the waltz people engaged in when all else was suspiciously stable. He would leave, I would follow, I would stop, I would go, he would come. On a great day, we would miss the sunset and talk about how we feel about each other and what went wrong the minute before. We were rational; it disturbed me. We were calm and kept ourselves from feeling deep. I figured he was jealous of the way I squeezed his hand during a poem. I never did that during sex.

And by the time his window was a black shoe, I had forgotten all about reading Whitman in the sun and writing odes. We had successfully gotten nowhere, and he preferred it that way. We wasted the day like the seeds of a morning orange, spitting them out like they’d stick in our throats and kill us. The difference was I wanted to plant them.

When he woke up I had already been staring out the window for an hour. I saved his pipe from falling off the side of the bed and scattering ashes. I picked the loose change off my skin which had fallen out of our pockets in a flurry of pants. I smoked because he taught me how and held the fire in the palm of my hand.

It was already later than I’d hoped, or earlier, depending on how you looked at it. Halfway through, I noticed the watch on my wrist and figured he’d be done in a while and I could go home and read articles on the latest collection of modern poetry and feel like a priest in their confessional experiences, stories about fathers and mothers and distant lovers. And then I wonder if I’ll have anything else to offer but these untold confessions, lying half-naked in the folds of some boy’s comforter.

There was nothing more I could give him that he would accept. I snaked my way under his arm and left him snoring, found my jeans and my black-heeled boots. He would call me in the morning and sit in during my poetry class because I need his hand there. He would invite me over to his place and get stone-faced when I said no. We would go somewhere beautiful and talk about ourselves. We would forget about our parents and recreate their relationships without even knowing it. We would carry around books of poetry for no reason. We would remember everything about the night before and repeat it.

I would regret the day and go home with the intention of writing about my regret. And when he left, I would write about the loss and the absence of his hand in class. And I would allude to my father and find comfort in the blame. And if I ever walked by him, I would greet him vacantly, holding hands with another boy to another poem.