The heady talk of Freshman pretension swirls amidst the stench of pot smoke and beer in the crowded basement common room. Event horizons, postmodernism, chaos theory, minds blown. The only thing blowing Joel’s mind is the vortex of galactic tuition fees that admission to this selective, flaky college has thrust him into—a singularity of devouring debt. 

Even Freshman Writing offered no relief. What should have been a refuge of reassuring practicality on how to avoid a sentence splice and ensure tense consistency descended into a pseudo-philosophical discussion on the instability of metalanguage.

‘Any idiot can verb a noun,’ Joel had muttered in an unusual display of petulance, mortifyingly witnessed by the one classmate he would have preferred to impress, whose name (and everything else about her) remained a mystery. Chastened for his churlishness by a pitying glance from her dramatically lined eyes, he was smitten with a sudden certainty that she could see straight through his pathetic armor of contempt. 

‘Let me guess,’ he hears her say now, her breath a warm whisper on his defenseless neck. ‘You’re the kind of guy whose world is made of nouns.’

Whatever this means, it might once have been true. But now only the solidity of her palms on his shoulders keeps him on the ground, and her thumb on the base of his newly soft skull tethers him upward like a balloon in the moment before its release.

She does not say ‘Let’s dance,’ but ‘Let’s do the dancing,’ in honor of his former dependence on nouns. But now it’s the verb that brings him the stability he once yearned for. They dance, they’re dancing, they’ve never stopped dancing, nor will they ever, he hopes. May we dance forever is his silent prayer, or at least, he pleads, until the singular moment when the matter of his being is formed in the flux of their spiraling embrace.