dashed away
3:49 a.m.

Charles,

I saw you a few days ago but you did not see me. You were talking to a girl who, frankly, was rather plain-looking. But you --- oh my. You were handsome, dashing. Incredibly so. Have you now started dressing up every day? Do you have some new job that requires you to look professional on a regular basis? Or is this simply a new fashion direction that you've taken?

In my diary, I wrote an entry about how seeing the movie Lost in Translation taught me the lesson of walking away gracefully. But when I saw you, and when I let you walk away without you noticing me or me stopping to get your attention, I wasn't even thinking about that entry (which I had just written the previous night). At first, I thought it might be an unconscious thing: me finally realizing and applying the lesson of walking away, of moving on. But then I quickly realized that it was fear, fear of rejection. Not the kind of rejection you gave me when I first said I love you, but rejection towards my existence, like in our final argument with each other. I couldn't stand to see you look at me as a relic from your past, a bitter memory that you'd just as soon forget. So I kept on walking, just like Scarlett Johansson had to do in Lost in Translation. I cried, not on the outside, and as I secretly cried, I walked on.

I still have not yet written an entry about running into you again. I need time to compose my feelings and write a coherent narrative about what it was like to see you on campus on that day of all days, when I hadn't seen you at all for most of the semester. Of all the days to see you, of all the walkways I had to pass through, that moment was the exact moment when I had to run into you. Ours is not a large campus, so I guess it was inevitable. Right? And maybe I wanted this, maybe I wanted a random meeting, even if it was just a fleeting glance on my part. Because when I go to sleep, when I retreat to solitude ... Charles, you're still the one I want. I love you.

Joseph

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