I remember the private conversations I had with my writing adviser in high school. Love, boys, boyfriends (hers), dreams (mine), broken ones (hers) and I couldn't help but wonder what has happened to her since I left. One day, I received a letter from her, or rather, a one-line message, written in her neat, cramped hand on the back of a filing card.

'"The trick is to love somebody. If you love one person, you see everyone differently."James Baldwin'

I added the quote to my database, made a note that I should attempt to find the source, and threw the card away. The fact is, and was, that I am not James Baldwin, nor E.M. Forster, nor Sylvia Plath, nor Virginia Woolf, nor Anne Sexton. I am Katrina Magallanes, an amateur business student who has given up the life of the writerly for a more practical, more down-to-earth profession which had-I could not say-stifled my internal longings for fiction, and more appropriately, romantic dramas.

If Miss Elle* had discovered what Baldwin had described as 'the trick of love', then she might as well tell me, so that I need not go through any heart-crushing emotional torment that had been described by the countless of girls I had, for myself, counseled on love and relationships.

Miss Elle, I am not used to this but you are not here. I have concluded that the best way to convey this reality is not to engage in stuttered explanation but to re-establish our teacher-pupil relationship by a dint of a sensible text message to tell you, Maam I'm in Marbel.