It’s a Friday morning in September, three weeks into your freshman year, and Chris the RA is coming toward you down the cinderblock hall. He looks doleful. The metal door of your dorm room thuds closed as you head for the stairwell. You’re meeting a friend for breakfast downstairs in the dining hall. Still Chris walks toward you. He hails you with one hesitant hand. He’s moving stiffly and in slow motion, like the butler in that movie who soldiers on despite (as the camera soon reveals) the knife sticking out of his back.

Last night, Homer showed up. He was wearing the white bucks you used to love, walking in that duck-footed way you used to find charming. But in your new life as a college student, his 30-something adultness has begun to feel clunky, unwieldy, embarrassing, old. After a yearlong epistolary romance and the illicit thrill of consummation, his aura has begun to morph from debonair to adrift. The relationship should have ended before you got here. Correction: you should have ended it. That you didn’t because you were afraid to hurt him will appear, in the hindsight of today, both ironic and craven.

But behold, the mind is a marvelous a thing. Instead of feeling guilty for causing the desperation that drove him to your college campus last night, you felt indignant. He was an intruder, a grown-up who should know better. You were young and free. It was Thursday evening, and as the two of you stood under the archway, streams of students, also young and free, flowed past on their way to Funk Night. When you finally muttered No in response to his You don’t want this anymore? you didn’t look him in the eye, but you did watch him walk away.

And now here is Chris the RA, telling you what Homer did to himself after you turned to go.

Sarah C. Baldwin is a Rhode Island-based writer whose essays have appeared in Pangyrus, Salamander, Cleaver Magazine, The Rumpus, Salon, In Short, Lindenwood Review, OxMag, Autofocus, and elsewhere. Her work has also been published in numerous American university magazines. She holds an MFA in creative nonfiction from the Stonecoast Creative Writing program.