I would choose you

Professor T.

The morning light was brighter than I expected - clearer, colder. It cut through the window like a sheet of glass, turning the frost on the panes to silver.

Hannah was already awake, brushing her hair in long, methodical strokes. She wore a white turtleneck and a long brown skirt and looked, as always, like a storybook character. She reminded me of sunshine.

“We have three lectures with him today,” she said, grinning at me in the mirror. “Three.”

“With who?”

“You know who.”

I stretched and rubbed my eyes. “Please don’t say it like that.”

She didn’t hesitate. “Professor T. Emiliano. The man of my dreams.”

I snorted. “Dreams where someone lectures you on post-structuralism until you beg for mercy?”

“Exactly.”

We laughed.

The hallway was loud that morning. Students rushing to breakfast, books under their arms, scarves flung loosely over shoulders. We grabbed coffee and something resembling a scone, then joined the rest of the literature group in the small classroom just off the main library.

Professor T. was already there. Standing at the head of the room, leaning against the desk, arms folded across his chest. There was no projector, no slides. Only a blackboard behind him and a single sentence written in chalk:

“Estrangement is the clearest kind of vision.”

We took our seats. I ended up between Hannah and Maria. Nicole sat directly across from me, as usual. Violet arrived last, and did not apologize for it.

Professor T. began.

“Let’s get one thing out of the way,” he said, straightening up. “The course schedule says this is ‘World Literature.’ The next hour is ‘English Literature.’ The hour after that is ‘Poetry and Poetics.’ Forget all that.”

He walked to the blackboard and circled the word estrangement.

“You cannot compartmentalize literature. It resists boundaries. So today, you’ll get all three lectures at once.”

Arthur raised a hand. “So we only have to pay attention one-third as hard?”

Professor T. smiled charmingly. “No. You’ll have to pay attention three times harder.”

A few students laughed. I glanced at Hannah. Her cheeks were flushed.

“I’m not going to explain to you what literature is,” he continued. “If you’re here, you’ve earned your way in. You don’t need definitions. You need discomfort. You need friction. You need to read what unsettles you. That’s where we begin.”

He picked up a copy of The Metamorphosis from the desk. A tattered edition. He held it lightly, like it weighed nothing.

“This was on your summer list. Kafka. A man wakes up as a bug. That’s how the story starts. But the real horror - the real estrangement - is not in the transformation.”

He paused.

“It’s in the way his family stops seeing him.”

That’s when I started taking notes.

⸻

The lecture moved quickly—back and forth between Kafka’s narrative and the way the world treats the unrecognizable. Emiliano spoke about the ordinary mechanisms of dehumanization. About the moment we become foreign in the eyes of those who once called us home. He quoted from the text without looking at it. Gregor’s sister slowly taking away his furniture. The father hurling apples. The silence of the mother.

Abraham raised his hand. “What makes it worse,” he said, “is that it’s not rage. It’s indifference. It’s dailiness.”

Maria added, “It’s the way they start saying ‘it.’ Even though he still understands them. That’s the cruelty.”

Nicole’s voice followed, soft but clear. “He’s most human when no one’s looking at him. That’s the real metamorphosis.”

I looked up. She wasn’t looking at anyone. Her eyes were fixed on the blackboard.

Emiliano nodded once. “Exactly.”

I didn’t say a word during that first hour. I was too busy watching. Watching the professor, the way he circled the room like a wolf who didn’t need to prove he was in charge, Nicole, who never seemed to blink, Violet, who flipped through her copy of the book like it bored her.

When the bell rang, Emiliano didn’t move.

“Ten-minute break,” he said. “Then back here.”

⸻

During the break, we spilled out into the hallway. Arthur leaned against a window ledge, tossing a coin between his fingers.

“He’s either a genius or a cult leader,” he said. “I haven’t decided.”

August shrugged. “The best professors are both.”

I walked beside Nicole on the way back into the room. For a moment, we were the only two at the door. She glanced sideways.

“Kafka?” she said.

“Depressing.”

“I liked it.”

“Of course you did.”

She didn’t answer. She smiled slightly, and it irritated me more than anything she could have said.

⸻

The second session was shorter. Emiliano asked only one question: “What do we do with estrangement once we recognize it?”

No one answered right away.

Hannah said, “We write through it.”

Violet cut in: “That’s naïve. Writing doesn’t solve anything.”

“It doesn’t have to solve,” Hannah replied gently. “It just has to be true.”

Violet scoffed, like she couldn’t be bothered.

Emiliano let the silence stretch again. Then: “The third session is canceled.”

Everyone looked up.

“I’ve left copies of two additional texts in the library. "No Longer Human" by Osamu Dazai and "The Bell Jar" by Sylvia Plath. Choose a passage from each. Meet this afternoon for a study circle. One hour. No structure. No leadership. Talk.”

“And if we don’t?” Arthur asked.

“Then you’ll be boring.”

He left the room without another word.

⸻

Lunch was quieter than usual. I sat with Hannah, Maria, and Abraham. August drifted over. Nicole came late, slipping into the seat across from me without asking.

Hannah was glowing. “I want him to narrate my life.”

Arthur, mouth full of bread: “He probably would. Very slowly. With lots of symbolism.”

“Did you read The Bell Jar?” Nicole asked suddenly, eyes on her soup.

“Last year,” I said.

“It’s not about depression,” she said. “It’s about absence. Like she’s watching her life through a glass wall.”

I didn’t answer. I didn’t want to agree with her.

Violet wasn’t at lunch.

⸻

The library was warm with afternoon light. We sat in a loose circle of armchairs and floor cushions beneath the windows. Someone had brought a tin of shortbread. Hannah made tea. It felt like a séance.

Violet dominated the conversation almost immediately.

“Plath is overrated,” she said, crossing her legs. “Everyone reads her because they think suffering is romantic.”

Maria raised an eyebrow. “That’s... reductive.”

“No, it’s realistic.”

Hannah tried to interject. “I think there’s something beautiful in the way she writes about despair.”

“That’s because you’re sentimental,” Violet said flatly.

I bit the inside of my cheek.

August spoke up. “The glass bell isn’t a symbol of fragility. It’s of pressure. Of distance.”

Nicole: “She’s not even in the room anymore. She’s ghosting through it.”

Violet: “That’s just melodrama.”

Abraham leaned forward. “Why are we afraid of melodrama?”

Violet rolled her eyes. “Because it’s easy. It’s unearned.”

Arthur, finally: “Is this a discussion or a debate?”

Violet fell quiet after that, but it wasn’t submission. Just withdrawal. I had the feeling she didn’t lose often, and when she did, she just waited for the next round.

We moved on to No Longer Human.

Maria pointed out the narrator’s constant self-doubt.

“He doesn’t trust himself,” she said. “So how are we supposed to?”

Abraham: “Because we recognize the lies.”

August: “Or we recognize the parts we want to lie about.”

Nicole stayed silent. I watched her. I watched her more than I meant to.

Eventually, Hannah turned to me. “Sylvia?”

I hesitated.

“I think..." I began, “maybe estrangement isn’t a mirror. Maybe it’s a veil.”

Everyone looked at me.

“Something you see through, but never clearly. Something that reminds you you’re not really part of the scene.”

There was a pause.

And then, a voice from the corner.

“Well said.”

I turned. Emiliano had been there the whole time. Leaning against a bookshelf. Silent.

No one had seen him arrive.

He nodded once and disappeared again.

⸻

That night, I walked alone.

The campus looked different in the dark. Like it belonged to someone else. The buildings seemed older. The trees leaned differently. Even the air had a texture I hadn’t felt before.

I passed the chapel, the library, the empty lecture hall windows.

I thought of Gregor Samsa. Of the glass bell. Of masks and mirrors and veils.

I thought of Nicole’s voice. Violet’s interruptions. Emiliano’s silence.

Despite the laughter, the notebooks, the new names I was starting to memorize, there was a part of me that still felt like I was pressing my face against a glass wall, watching the world from the outside.

I was making friends. I was learning. And still, somehow, I was estranged.