Kurzgeschichte
Sprache: englisch
Geschrieben 2020

More than a Poem

I met her at the public library. I was there every Thursday to study in peace because my super annoying room mate had decided to accompany me to the university library whenever I went there. So, there I was, at the public library at a desk in the poetry section (because it was the section with the lowest probability of children storming in) despairing over my sociology essay, every Thursday.

There I was, and so was she. She was not sitting at a desk, she would browse through the shelves, taking out one book or the other and eventually she would settle with one, sit down in one of the armchairs that looked way more comfortable than the plastic chair I was seated in and begin to read.

Of course I didn't know whether she was here only every Thursday like me. Maybe she was here every day. Maybe that was why she didn't seem to notice me. Or maybe she did and only was a lot better at hiding her quick glances than I was.

Whether she noticed me or not, I definitely noticed her and she intrigued me. For one, she was incredibly beautiful, but that was not the reason I kept catching myself staring at her. The reason was that she seemed utterly devoted to poetry. I didn't know anything about her, not her name, not how old she was or whether she was a student like me or something completely different. I only knew that each Thursday she took her time selecting a collection of poems and then she would start reading, her eyes scurrying over the pages and her lips forming a small smile whenever she seemed to particularly like a line or verse. I could always tell when she fell in love with a poem because then she would take out a small notebook to write down the title and poet. Sometimes she even took a picture of a page with her phone.

Thursdays were definitely the days when I got done the most and I kept telling myself that was the reason I came here every week. And perhaps it was. But I couldn't deny that I looked forward not only to the peace and quiet the absence of my room mate brought with it but also the tingling feeling in my stomach that was undeniably caused by the presence of a girl I knew nothing about except that she apparently really liked poetry.

I had over the past years developed an own interest in this art and since my fourteenth birthday seven years ago written over sixty poems myself, some of higher and some of honestly rather low quality. The earlier pieces I now looked at with an amused smile, but of some of the later poems I had written I was really proud. I had actually published them online and there were even some twenty-something people who had read them there. Once or twice I had thought about trying to publish them as a poetry volume like all those around me every Thursday, but I had discarded the idea pretty quickly.

As I watched the fingers of the girl skim over the spines of the books I wished I had not.

But publishing a book was extremely time consuming and I honestly could not imagine anyone liking or even reading my poetry, so I knew rationally that it had been the right call. I had accepted that the height of my career as a poet had been that one time when one of these twenty readers had liked a poem of mine so much that they had asked if they could write it on their bedroom wall.

And still.

"You keep staring at me," she said, looking up from the book in her lap. I was startled: we had never talked before. Her voice was different than I imagined, somehow warmer. I straightened my spine.

"I'm sorry," I said. I wanted to defend myself but I couldn't really come up with a good reason for my behaviour. Not when she kept looking at me with that much amusement in her beautiful brown eyes, anyway. I started fidgeting with my pen.

"I don't mind." She smiled and I relaxed somewhat. "I don't really understand, but I don't mind. It's not every day a pretty girl can't seem to keep her eyes off me." She winked, she actually winked and I really had to keep myself from laughing in disbelief. It looked really awkward, but it still stunned me that she was obviously trying to flirt with me. I scratched the back of my head in lack of something intelligent to say.

"Well, you are really beautiful to stare at." I finally said though I would rather have said something less weird, but hey. "And you like poetry, which I do, too, so I guess..." I didn't know what I guessed. That we could like each other? Was that too forward to say? I sighed. "I'm sorry, I'm really not good at...this."

Her smile got a wider the more I said.

"Would you like to go out for coffee sometime, maybe?", she interrupted me. I blinked.

"I don't drink coffee," I said and could have slapped myself for the literally most stupid answer ever. "I mean, yes, obviously." I tried to save myself. She seemed to be amused again.

"Maybe tea then?", she proposed, closing her book.

"Now?" I asked. How was this done? What did the unwritten rules about dating say in situations like these? She shrugged.

"If you don't have stuff to do." She pointed at the pile of books and papers in front of me – the pieces from which I was supposed to assemble an essay that would save my grade for this semester.

"No," I assured her. Then I realised that was a lie. "I mean, yes. But it can wait." Also not true but I honestly couldn't imagine my concentration being very high when I could instead have tea with this girl I had pined over for the last few months.

She smiled.

"Let's go, then.", she said. "We can talk about poetry."

And we did. Not only, of course. We talked about quite a lot that afternoon. And we drank tea, well, she drank coffee, I drank tea. We ate vegan chocolate muffins and talked some more. We exchanged phone numbers and parted ways.

Then we started messaging and meeting again, first at the coffee shop then at the park or in the cinema. We kissed at my doorstep and I asked her to be my girlfriend on hers. Days turned into weeks and summer into autumn and suddenly it was too cold to meet outside. And since my room mate only kept getting more annoying with each day she invited me over to her place.

She lived in a block of flats in the fifth floor with two room mates who were significantly nicer than mine. All three people obviously liked plants because the flat was full of them. It was beautiful and I wondered if her room would look like that as well.

She opened the door and I stepped in, looking around. The room was painted a nice warm yellow colour and there were indeed flowers on the parapets. The walls were full of pictures and quotes. I turned around and what I saw rendered me speechless.

On the wall over her desk, between a picture of the ocean and a print of Van Gogh's Sunflowers, hung a poem. It was written in beautiful calligraphy, dark blue on pale yellow. I stepped closer to be sure I had seen it correctly.

"It's a poem I found on the internet," she explained from behind me. "I loved it after first reading it and the author actually gave me permission to put it up."

I still couldn't pull away my eyes from those words, those familiar words.

"I know," I said quietly. "I wrote it."

Dedicated to xsvara, you know, why.