The rosy days

In our first year, we spent an inordinate number of hours planning how everyone on our floor would simultaneously blast Carmina Burana out their window one evening. The plot was satisfying even if it never came true.

You would knock on my door out of the blue and ask me to sit with your candle while you fetched your finished laundry.

One thrilled spring night we roved the campus with the King's Crown troupe. In the middle of this expansive Tempest, a fairy tapped me on the shoulder so that I would make room for her to pass.

KN

Ever since I labeled my umbrella handle with my initials, I feel self-conscious on the train. "Now strangers know my name," I said.

"They're just your initials!" you said. "That still leaves a lot to the imagination."

Poseidon

"Say hello," you command strangers on the street.

You want to hear their voice. You are looking for a voice. It eludes you, like Cinderella's foot, like Xeno's arrow.

You don't run a chorus on the side; you suffer from partitioned brain. 

Your wits are literally about you.

You are talking to anyone who will listen. 

Whole Foods Bowery

"Where you work?" he asked.

"Midtown," I said.

"Midtown Comics?" he said.

"No, just midtown," I said.

"Oh," he said, "cause when people say midtown, I always think Midtown Comics."

Rejoinder

In the space of a song – "I want you (She's so heavy)"– I swung my hand too wildly inside the refrigerator, cracking open an egg without meaning to. And I fried the egg, and ate it with a relish on a hunk of nine-grain bread, while the flattered afternoon took its leave of me.

Waiting for it

"This bread's not very good," I said.

"Maybe it's spelt wrong," you said.

Babysitting charge

She called me, "Rapunzel."

In the metro, she commanded me to turn around and show off my hair to strangers.  Emerging onto the street, she said seriously, "Let's go the barber."

"Let's not," I said.

One day she drew a single tooth and its accompanying gum -- nothing else.

When she said, "Thanks," it sounded like a sneeze.

"This bag is really heavy," remarked her mother in the elevator one day. "It's like I have rocks in here." She began to rummage in her bag, and pulled out two big rocks. "Well," she said, "I think I know who put these here."