A type of pencil

or, how that's a terrible title for a short story

I knew a girl once who sent text messages with all the words joined up, WritingLikeThisWithoutAnyKindOfSpaces. It was weird, though granted it was the early 2000s, the nascent era of mobile phones, a time when credit was limited and when everyone would take steps to compress what they said into a single message. The peril of crossing the threshold into two messages, the worry of how rapidly you’d diminish your funds. Text speech emerged, words were cut and abbreviated, acronyms abounded. But still, no one I knew wrote like that. No one except her. Seeing it still makes my heart jump.

This was all back during my first year of university. I was starting to discover who I was, the boat of my soul finding some mooring alongside shores unknown. If I had a shell, I was emerging from it, like some broken moth.

Then I met B—.

I don’t remember how we met. OK, that’s not true. I do. I’ve thought about it enough over the years. We happened to play the same instrument. I wasn't all that good, but it was just one of those things where I'd played in school and so sort of kept going with it when I got to university. Back then, I rolled along a linear trajectory of time, unconscious of choice or consequence. Signing up for the orchestra was no different; I did so with a kind of lacklustre apathy, a pathetic inability of free will I find I now detest. Anyway, that first night I sat in my section near the back, arranging my music stand with clumsy hands and fumbling through the pieces we were to play, a creeping sensation already present that there was a certain depth to the room and I was very much out of it. It was a little before 7 p.m. and I knew no one else. I noticed the seat next to me was empty and wondered who my fellow musician might be, and just as I did a girl walked through the door. She was short, beautiful, with black hair that fell to her shoulders and framed a face I had never seen. She carried a case, one that was large enough to hold an instrument like mine, and as I looked I realised she was moving toward me and then she was… she was suddenly there, sitting next to me and unclipping the case and removing her instrument. She smiled, letting one side of her mouth creep a little higher than the other. As she got comfortable in her seat, we proceeded to have an entire conversation without saying anything, her eyes telling me that she, too, wasn't all that good but that she had played in high school and, for no reason other than routine, had decided to continue and joined the orchestra. This went on, our silent conversation, the conductor and ensemble oblivious to a language written not with staves and clefts, words or phrases, but instead with a sly glance and tilt of the head. I found it the most natural thing in the world.

I walked out that night with something burning deep inside.

I saw B— again the next week. We exchanged numbers. She was studying Law, or something like that. I was the complete opposite. Her whole world was a different part of campus. Each day I'd trudge up a hill, slip on a white coat and pretend to know what I was doing at a lab bench whilst she—somewhere else, in some mysterious building I'd never entered or even seen—was studying Law. Or Economics. I forget which. As it turned out, we lived in the same halls of residence, though she was on the other side of the concrete courtyard that formed a quadrangle—its rough square complete with abstract red sculpture—separating the various buildings. My room was on the far side, facing nothing but a bleak expanse of woods. I remember thinking that had my room been on the other side, on the side that had the quadrangle, I could have looked across the concrete with its strange artwork and perhaps seen her there at her window, and we would have waved and laughed and continued whatever conversation we’d happened to be having. But I wasn’t on that side. Those conversations sent from window to window never occurred.

AreUInCanIComeOver?

She texted that one evening, not long after we’d met. I tapped out a Yes, a single word never having left my hands faster. I waited, and soon enough she arrived. She walked along the hallway and into my room, my friends extending necks around doorways to offer prying eyes. She sat down on the bed next to me and held out her hands. In them was a MiniDisc.

It’s the Shrek soundtrack, she said, handing me the MiniDisc. I thought it would cheer you up.

I didn’t own a MiniDisc player. I had no way of playing what was, I felt, a mix tape.

I don’t own a MiniDisc player, I said, indicating the lack of such a device in my room.

She shrugged, as though signalling with her body that I could still hear the contents if I tried. Then she left, touching my arm for a moment before she stood. As she walked out, I held the little disc between my fingers, imagining the way she must have selected and recorded each track.

Several weeks passed. The routine of university found its groove and I was there in the furrows. With each week I would go to the orchestra, aware of the only reason I was there. It was precious time, I began to realise. It was time that was finite, a special yet finite time that B— and I shared together. We laughed. We said stupid things. We paid little attention to the music, playing instead our own.

Then, one night B— simply wasn’t there.

IveMetSome1IDntHaveTime4OrchestraNowSry, she sent me the next day. It was a guy on her course, she told me, someone else studying Law, or Economics, or whatever degree it was. I don't remember his name. It might have been M—.

I guess I sort of let go after that. The rope was severed and out my lone skiff drifted, to explore the murky waters of my late teens. We kept in touch. A little bit. I kept going to the orchestra—even went on a short tour of some various cities in Europe, utterly oblivious to the advances of a girl in the ensemble, my mind too fixated on what had happened. What hadn’t happened. The rest of university went quickly. Things resolved into a rhythm. Occasionally I’d see B— on campus, off in the distance, as unreachable as the mysterious buildings she inhabited. Occasionally she’d message and I’d reply back. One time she tried to call late at night, but the signal was bad and I couldn't hear what she said, and when I returned the call the connection wouldn't go through. I saw M— on occasion, too. He was tall. He would smile, though no words passed between our eyes.

I could understand. I wasn’t angry. I was just the guy B— met in the orchestra, the one who didn’t study Law, the one who lived in the same halls but whose room was on the wrong side of it all.

I never did tell her how I felt.

---

Photo by Umberto on Unsplash

It was 4B, by the way, in case that wasn’t clear.