Across the quad, I saw a girl.

I had been in her freshman English survey, distracted by attraction during discussions of gender in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. “I like this girl in my class,” I had said to my friends, “she told the professor to ‘call her Kath’.” Is she pretty, they asked. “I don’t know. She is to me.”

It was the kind of romantic notion that feels genuine only to the subject, surprising me as it received admiring sighs, one I would have cynically pitied were it spoken by anyone else. My depressive-anxiety had amplified the sentiment, leveraging my inability to approach her and torturing me with fixation: I’d trace the mysterious paths of her braided hair, worn in unique variations yet always appearing natural, as if each day the pattern emerged in the very moment she wound the long brown strands together; her green eyes glazing over a dull lecture, then snapping back to focus with a large, cartoon blink 30 seconds later; her graceful movements as she tucked her earth-toned knit scarf into a parka that covered most of her body. She looked like a faerie, pulled from the prairie preserves nestled a mile into the woods behind my old house and dropped into an urban winter, and I had spent much of that semester’s discussions trying not to imagine her naked.

I spoke to her a year later, when she had appeared in the same British lit course I was taking. “Hey, Kath? I think you were in my class last year.” I hadn’t been any better, mentally, but I had to avoid another semester of creepy contemplation. She had recognized me and smiled as her face flushed — I felt a kindred anxiety as mine did the same. In equally shaky voices we exchanged a hello-good-to-see-you-again and see-you-next-class, an interaction cut short as residual fear of starting the conversation clouded our small talk faculties. I had thought, from the surprise in her eyes when she turned and looked up at me that, maybe, said ‘he’s finally talking to me’, that she liked me.

I hadn’t seen her until now, seven months later, across the quad. She hadn’t returned to the class; I figured that her face had flushed not from a projected commonality, but because I was obviously introducing myself with hopes of talking to her again and her telling me she was dropping the class was not socially coherent — who am I to be told such a thing. Now there she was, her braids darker in the shade of the lawn’s trees than they were under fluorescence, walking north towards the Student Union with the 2:50PM post-lecture train. I moved south past the English building, where my memory stayed suspended outside room 103, the red in her face turning back into my projections. I couldn’t talk to her, I wasn’t any better.

Winter had sideswiped us, in midwestern fashion, with a January-February wind chill averaging below zero that made getting to class in the morning as difficult as keeping a shower to 15 minutes max or throwing the covers off when snooze is in arm’s reach; yet it slid from my mind as smoothly as the snow melted, and I still sat in the Union’s Pine Lounge every Wednesday afternoon with a coffee and headphones. In the backpack at the armchair’s feet was a novel with two bookmarks that I couldn’t move myself to read over my smartphone. Noise filled my ears and eyes, pushing into my mind like a heavy weight compressing a stack of linens.

I pulled my headphones out and locked the screen, rubbing the stiffness from my neck as the quiet air-conditioner hum defragmented my thoughts. The alternating sky-blue and orange chairs that lined the walls of the room had emptied two to three hours ago, as students moved from lounging to studying. I looked up, finishing the final sips of a cold coffee once burnt, towards the long wood table in the center of the room surrounded by hunched backs and laptops. Above a copy of Mrs. Dalloway, I saw a familiar brown braid that began above faerie green eyes and disappeared over the top, only to reappear resting on her left shoulder. She sat in the middle, facing me, leaning back but no less intent on the book.

Two days in a row after two semesters without. I’d come to terms with the feeling yesterday, and so I felt now only a resigned surprise. To choose a Wednesday to visit the Pine Lounge, at that purgatorial time of day when post-lecture weariness dragged against study habits, so soon after I had seen her in passing, seemed odd. Then, revolting against my resignation, I realized that I could grab the coincidental and make it serendipitous, if only I could get up and be better.

Hello; it could be so easy. She seems to remember me, I reintroduce myself politely. I smile and joke about how I scared her out of the class; I think I was charming in high school, not long ago, or at least cocky enough to get by. Her eyes go wide with a surprised laugh as she no-no-nos, that-wasn’t-it-at-all, I grin through a sarcastic sure-sure; our faces weren’t flushing in the hallway outside of class last year, I saw her next class. Suddenly aware of our happy volume and the indignant glances it brings, I sit across from her and quietly mention how we read Woolf in her absence. Maybe after a few minutes we decide to go out to the round tables just outside the exit in the hallway to the right. It must be getting sun right about now.

A cloud moved and a blinding ray of light shot through the high west window, illuminating half of the long-table, starting at her seat. The beam was so shocking, so brilliant, it was as if the sun had briefly lost its footing as it climbed down the sky, sliding a few thousand miles until grabbing hold again. Kath jolted, along with the rest of her neighbors at the table. People blinked, dazed; some held their hands up in shade from the window, squinting into the now relatively dark room as their pupils dilated. They began shutting their laptops, screens invisible in the glare, and slowly rose from their seats, stretching their backs in the illuminated dust mites dancing in the air. A girl two seats from Kath, stood up and said something with a grin—I couldn’t hear her. Everyone around her laughed at their collective predicament as they packed up to find a less blinding location. I thought them linked, spontaneously acquainted in a god ray, as they moved in sync and in laughter. As the group left the lounge Kath walked next to the funny girl, making conversation so natural it felt like the light from the window was following them out of the room.

So far out of reach was all that I wanted. Spontaneity is annihilated by anxiety so that were I to be caught in that beam I would have missed the joke as it unfolded around me. So clear to me in my armchair on the wall was my distance from it all, distance I thought caused by my inability to hold eye contact, when really my internal computer running simulations of the future just hated to be wrong. I allow myself no human randomness, I thought on Wednesday in the same armchair in the Pine Lounge as the light swept up over the table towards the east wall. I scratched the back of my neck in frustration, anxious to relieve myself of self-hatred and self-pity and get back to the way I was just moments ago, head and eyes dulled with noise, unconcerned with the air-conditioner hum or spring sunshine or brunette braids.

The ruffle of a newspaper to my right pulled me out of myself. I turned my head and saw a copy of the school newspaper held as if by a spy, only a hand visible on the edge of the page and their back pressed into the sky-blue chair. The page facing me had a headline that read “ ‘I want my daughter back’ ” above a picture of a young woman and her father. The story was everywhere: a visiting student from China had been kidnapped at a bus stop by a dropout of one of the university’s Ph.D. programs.

I looked back towards the long table and the beam tracking along it. Apparently, the investigation revealed she hadn’t been his initial target. She was brilliant, attending the school on full scholarship for work she had done in environmental engineering. She had played in a band — I read that somewhere. I felt a dull pain in my lower back that always started around this time. Rolling my headphones around my fingers, I held back a chuckle and shook my head. I continued shaking it as I stood up and threw my backpack over my shoulder, still shaking it as I walked out of the lounge and under the first EXIT sign, shaking it long enough to really rattle me, shaking it during the walk back home and into my room, where I locked the door behind me.