I plan for it. I brace myself, and yet when the silence comes I like it no better than if I had barely known it would come at all. Three times I write to him to say he did nothing wrong. And three times his failure to answer is a nagging hole that nothing will fill. There are no books interesting enough, no classes immersive enough. Someone from linguistics actually speaks to me in a casual, friendly way, but it doesn’t excite me the way it once would have. Instead I glance at my watch without meaning to, half-thinking of the computers in the library that I could check my emails on. By the time I look back at her she’s busy being friendly to someone else – someone more receptive than me. Someone who isn’t thinking about her once-was-Professor, and all the ways she could make him see that everything is fine. Everything is absolutely all right. If you want to go back to the beginning again, I write, we can go back to the beginning. Pretend that I never talked about how much I want you and you can say the same, and everything can be as it was.
