She smiled at strangers. When she spoke to people, she always made an effort to notice their eye color. She worked at the local planetarium every day until four in the afternoon, moderating presentations about planets and black holes, and answering breathless questions from excited children. Every afternoon she would walk home along sidewalks lined with trees, and admire the green-gold crochet pattern of the sunlight filtered through the leaves as it shifted in and out of existence on her skin. She never failed to notice the pattern. When she got to the small house she shared with her roommates, she would often sit at her desk and write until late into the evening. She wanted to be a horror novelist.

Her favorite hobby was writing love letters to strangers. When she felt sad, lonely, or bored, she would sit down with a page of her nicest stationery, and compose a kind letter, writing as though to a dear friend. When she finished, she would seal it in an envelope, and hide it wherever she went to run errands the next day: on shelves at the grocery store, tucked between the pages of a library book chosen at random, the empty seat she left behind on the bus. She wondered how many of her letters were found. She wanted so badly to find a letter in return, one filled with the same fierce and clumsy love she constantly tried to express to the world.

Her biggest problem was that she did not know when to be scientific, harshly scrutinizing and analytical, and when to examine a situation creatively and emotionally. She was equally adept at both methods, but could not figure out when to use each lens. This problem made it difficult to keep lovers: a significant other would slight her in some small way, and she would use it as evidence that she was not truly cared for. The lover would be annoyed at her constant accusations and skepticism, and would leave. Contrariwise, at work she would sometimes find herself welling up with emotion in the middle of an explanation of neutron stars, simply because she was overwhelmed with the beauty of it. This had earned her a few lectures from her boss (though the children never seemed to notice, in the darkened room, that she was crying).

She didn’t know what she wanted, but she was happy enough with herself and with her life that it didn’t matter. She knew that everything would sort itself out in the end. One day she would find a lover who would stay. One day she would get her first book published, and then her second, and then her third. One day she would find an anonymous letter hiding underneath a jar of honey at the grocery store, written on nice stationery and teeming with fierce and clumsy love.

—By Lena J., 21, North Carolina