A bespectacled cloud of youthful loveliness, she sits just across from me. We are separated by a desk, on which her hands rest lightly, covered in half-chewed nail varnish. Cruel desk! I glare at its knotted surface, and it seems to glare back with furrowed brows.

My amour! My pearl! Every week she comes and stares at me placidly across the wooden expanse. Every week I gaze and stutter and try to think of something intelligent to say about a subject I have been studying for the past thirty years. But what are words, my flower, when your badly-mascaraed eyes are looking at me – often in a slightly glazed manner, I must confess – but ah! their half-closed lids are crescent moons; although in a few of my lectures, my darling, I admit I have seen them eclipse. And I, poor be-tweeded mortal that I am, am falling helplessly through the stars of your too-glittery eye makeup.

Literature, ever my faithful companion, holds no joys for me. Verses turn to dust; the lines run, eviscerated and screaming, into the night of my intellect. This term I have pushed it aside, and like a previously-beloved spaniel it waits for the return of my affection, watching with mournful liquid eyes.

But I am immune to its charms. As, my beloved, it occasionally seems you are too. I understand that I am no Troilus, or Tristan, or Arcite – but, when I envisaged us rhapsodizing over Shakespeare’s greatest love story in our tutorial, it must be said I had not anticipated you muttering ‘more cross-eye’d than star-cross’d’ under your rose-scented breath.

No matter. For I know that ours will not be the kind of love that must be glued to books to survive. We will rise from those dusty pages, Eloise and Abelard reincarnate. When those half-moons finally learn to open, to really look at the middle-aged man trembling before you – not in the prime of his life, perhaps, but certainly with a good heart, most of his hair and a tasteful line in ties – then, in the dazzling beams of those twin globes, will our bliss begin. You will lean forward, my Guinevere, your delicate lips will part (and, perhaps, even spit out that gum you adore so much), and I will fling my books and papers to one side to meet you.  

But how to get you to notice me, my cherub? You stare at me now as I mumble some inanity about the sublime, knowing full well that it sits across from me with overly-straightened hair. I must say something. Something that will seize your attention and hold it; something true and eternal that will remain unshakeably in your memory. I open my dry mouth and search for what to say – I can sense it, the moment comes, I must act! – I grasp, I fumble, and finally words come out –

“Your essay was shite,” I blurt. 

My darling, where are you going? Oh do not stamp towards the door so, the reverberations of your delicate feet bite cruelly into my heart. Dearest? Same time next week?