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It made no fucking sense that I couldn’t stop thinking about this girl. Amherst was filled with smart, pretty women, many of whom I’d known in the Biblical sense. Yet Autumn Caldwell’s beautiful smile and sweetness suffused my every waking moment. Something good and whole in her spoke to something rotted and broken in me.
Get over it.
Forget her.
Move on.
I blended the words into the rhythm of my feet hitting the pavement. Slipped them between the huffing of my breath.
It didn’t work that day. Autumn Caldwell was alive in my thoughts and I couldn’t run away from her.
Later that afternoo
n, I sat in my favorite course: Poetry, Essay, and Lyrical Writing. I hid behind my Econ major with an English Lit minor, where I could take the classes I truly cared about.
At the end of his lesson on form, Professor Ondiwuje assigned us a poem.
“Object of Devotion,” he said from the front of the lecture hall. He was in his mid-thirties, with smooth, dark skin and eyes that were sharp with intelligence and observation. Dreadlocks spilled over the lapels of his gray suit.
“I want you to expand your creativity. The object can be a person, of course. Or a dream. A goal. A physical item. The latest iPhone…”
A current of laughter rolled lightly through the class of sixty students.
“Dig deep, and leave nothing on the table,” he said. “Because in art, there are no limits. If you have only one takeaway from my class at the end of the year, let it be that poetry—the words by which we give shape to our thoughts—is as limitless as our thoughts themselves.”
The small auditorium rippled with enthusiasm.
“Mr. Turner,” Professor Ondiwuje called over the shuffling of students leaving after class. “Can I see you a moment?”
I shouldered my backpack and took the side stairs down to his desk. Trying to keep my cool. Michael Ondiwuje was quite possibly the only man on the planet I looked up to. He had won the William Carlos Williams Award for poetry at the age of twenty-four. A well-worn, dog-eared, highlighted and underlined copy of his collection, The Last Song of Africa, resided on my bookshelf.
The professor sat on the edge of his desk, rifling through some papers.
“I read the essay and the poem you submitted two weeks ago,” he said. “They were both very good. Excellent, even.”
“Thank you, sir,” I said, every cell in my body screaming, Holy shit. Michael Ondiwuje just said my work was excellent.
The professor raised his eyes from the papers to meet mine. Studying me. Taking me in. “English Lit is your minor, yes?” he finally asked.
“That’s right.”
“What do you plan to do with an Economics major?”
“I don’t know. Work on Wall Street.”
“That’s what you wish to do?”
“It would be better for my family situation,” I said slowly, “if I had a good job and steady income.”
He nodded. “I get that, but I can’t let talent like yours slink out the back of my class without saying something.”
I shifted my bag. “Okay.”
“When I read your work, I sense a young man with deep fires burning within and a cold wall around him.”
Professor O’s stare was relentless but I didn’t look away. My head moved in a faint nod.
“A guy with poetry in his blood,” the professor went on. “But he keeps his blood from spilling where anyone can see. He sits in the back. Doesn’t talk. All the while, words pile up inside. And to a mind and heart like his, all that emotion is hard to take. It’s too much. Dangerous. It hurts.” His eyes bored into mine. “Doesn’t it?”
