Dramatic Monologue

We were in the stage where we couldn’t make serious eye contact for fear of implying we were too invested. We used euphemisms like “I miss you” and “I like you” and smiled every time our noses got too close. I was staying over at his place two or three nights a week and met his parents at an awkward brunch in Burlington. A lot of time was spent being consciously romantic: making sushi, walking places, waiting too long before responding to texts. I fluctuated between adding songs to his playlist and wondering if I should stop hooking up with people I was eighty per cent into and finally spend some time alone. (Read the books I was embarrassed I hadn’t read.) (Call my mother.) The thing is, I like being liked, and a lot of my friends had graduated

I was microwaving instant Thai soup when I got a call from his best friend, asking if I knew which hospital he was at.

“Who?” I said. “Brian,” he said. “You haven’t heard?”

I was in a seminar my senior year where we read poems by John Keats. He has this famous one called “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” where these two lovers are almost kissing, frozen with their faces cocked beneath a tree. The tragedy, the professor said, is in eternal stasis. She never fades, they never kiss; but I remember finding the whole thing vaguely romantic. My ideal, after all, was always before we walked home—and ironically, I had that now.

* * *
I watched as the microwave droned in lopsided circles, but I never took the soup out. Someone else must have. Charlotte, perhaps, or one of my friends that came over in groups, offering foods in imitations of an adult response and trying to decipher my commitment. I was trying, too. I’d made out with a guy named Otto when I was back in Austin over Christmas, and Brian and I had never quite stopped playing games. We were involved, of course, but not associated.

“What’s the deal?” people would shout over the music when he’d gone to get a drink, and I’d explain that there was no deal to