I was hiding in my dorm room.

  The semester was slicing and dicing my brain.  James Taylor and Tracy Chapman music seemed to be the moon between Earth and Mars.  The last solid grip with human emotions on an intellectual mission to: 

     I didn't know anymore. 

  Each keg party was part we're so dumb and part, the hangover part, realizing such was devolving the whole person that family and community had painstakingly raised to be 

                Who knew who or what? 

  Impossible as it was, I'd forgotten that I'd sent a couple fiction stories to an editor.  It hadn't been on a whim.  At the suggestion of someone in the literary world who worked under the Greatest generation and above the relative few our-agers, a kind of trial and error was taking shape to see if anyone could work with anyone else. 

  "What are you doing in here?" She stood in the doorway of the opened-to-knock dorm room door.  I looked around the barrack-style cluttered study.  There would be no explaining how twenty years of living came and went through my study like a quirk in space, sometimes real as mama in her rocking chair, sometimes as unreal as time spent in foxholes.  "I mean, it's a gorgeous Spring day outside." 

  I glanced at the brash sunlight beyond the curtains.  "Who are you?" 

  On the way to the Meal Hall since offered to buy coffee and had enough points left for at least one, the editor complimented my grammar skills, it helps me read through faster.  I get A LOT of submissions.  "Is it a magazine?" I managed to not spill any coffee as I handed her one.  She brushed the back of a long skirt neat and sat on a retaining wall.  "It could be.  But I edit pre-swamp.  Peoples' writing could go to a magazine or into a book." 

  "But did my stories make you feel anything?" 

  She bit the inside of a cheek and stared forward.  "Not sure I felt anything but, 

  Scrambling in the mind for the moon, unsure Mars or Venus, maybe some constellation somewhere, anywhere but here 

  "It's probably because I've read three books, a History, and six thesis-maybe works in nine days." 

  "Oh.  Well.  They were stupid stories anyway.  One was trying to reconcile the Biblical and secular worlds.  And one was trying to put narrative to video games." 

  "TRON!  Now I know which writer you are.  Thanks for the coffee.  We didn't realize that you're still a student at this time."  Walking away.  "It disqualifies you from our, from what we're publishing at this time.  I, uh, do editing on the side but I don't have a business card for that and don't give out my personal number.  Yeah, your stories made me think! But, the topics, okay, I'll tell you that I've read you in newspapers and some other, you've done some readings, right?!  Well, what I'm trying to say, is that the industry is changing but you've, you've got what it takes to...I don't know, your work sparks others to keep going." 

  "Wow! Thank you." 

  A tiny watch face soldered onto a tennis bracelet on the perfume side of a bone thin wrist, the talked-about indicator, gotta go.  "Thanks.  Thanks so much."