Love. Romance. How could these two words affect us so much? Maybe we’re too attached? But attachment is quite different compared to love itself. Perhaps, we’re too busy daydreaming what love could do and how romantic it would be.

But love– it is something that creates wonder in me. How could I love someone who is sophisticated and wise in life? I know nothing. I am only trying to figure out what living looks like. And it sucks because men are part of it.

Where did I get the urge to like and love when my life is a misery? The man I used to curse and the man I met every time I walked in the hallway of university. How could he be so grateful that I existed when in my whole life I refuse to live? He’s far from what I expected. It’s funny because my heart went crazy every time I saw him.

Just after that, I realized that I put so much effort and this is it… He became part of the novel I’m writing. I turned him into paper, so I could go back and read the part where I hated men but dated one anyway.

I keep my notebooks in a particular order. Black spine for drafts, green for dialogue, red for the things I intend to destroy later. Nobody else is permitted to touch them. My roommate learned this the first week, when she picked up the green one to move it off the table and I took it from her hand so fast she got scratched.

"It's just a notebook," she said.

"It's not," I said, and left it there.

That is how most conversations go with me. I answer the question that was asked, nothing more, and let the silence do the rest of the work. People call it cold, but I think, why waste a sentence on someone who will only misread it? This logic seemed to follow through to my written work, when Professor Alvarez returned our manuscripts on Tuesday. An A-minus. I stared at it long enough for the girl beside me to lean over and whisper, "That's amazing, right?"

"It's fine," I said.

It was not fine. Beneath the grade, in her slanted green ink, Alvarez had written: Technically brilliant, but emotionally absent. Who is she afraid of?

I closed the manuscript. Afraid. As if I were afraid of anyone. I simply knew better than to hand people anything they could use against me. Writers who bleed onto the page are amateurs, begging strangers to pity them. I write clean sentences, and my sentences do not need to be loved. Still, the comment followed me out of the lecture hall and down the stairs, until a voice dragged me from my own rumination

"Hey, you dropped this."

I turned. It was him, of course. The same man from the hallway, who I had spent three weeks pretending not to notice. He was holding out my pen, the good one, the one I did not lend to anyone, and he had the nerve to smile like he wasn't getting fingerprints all over the polished metal. I took it without thanking him.

"You're in Alvarez's seminar," he said. "I've seen you. You never talk."

"I talk when I have something worth saying."

I expected him to shut down, drift away. Most people do. Instead he said: "Then I'll wait," and forced me to be the one to walk off, which I did before my face could betray me. Behind me I could feel him watching, and I sped up, annoyed at my own pulse, annoyed at the heat in my neck, annoyed most of all that I was already composing the scene in my head.

That night I sat on my bed with the red notebook open and wrote his name, then crossed it out so hard the pen tore the page.

Who is she afraid of?