Chapter 71 Chapter 71

Chapter 71 Chapter 71
Paris
The air in Lecture Hall 3B smelled of old paper, rain, and the nervous energy of a hundred freshers.
Maya and I had arrived twenty minutes early just to secure seats near the front row of the massive, tiered auditorium. Maya was currently flipping through her fresh syllabus and humming to herself, while I sat with my hands wrapped around a travel mug of coffee. My heart was thumping a steady, anxious rhythm against my ribs. This was the moment I had been anticipating for months. The official start of my university life.
“I heard the guy running this module is brilliant,” Maya whispered, leaning closer to me as the rows behind us filled up with students. “My second-year flatmate said he’s a bit of a legend in the department.”
Before I could answer, the heavy wooden door at the front of the hall swung open.
A guy walked in, carrying a leather messenger bag and a small stack of poetry books. I blinked, a sudden wave of recognition hitting me. I had seen him briefly during the chaotic general orientation, but I had completely assumed he was just another undergraduate student. He looked way too young to be a lecturer. He was tall and wore a sharp, tailored tweed blazer over a dark turtleneck, and he moved with a quiet confidence that immediately drew every eye in the room to the podium.
He didn’t waste any time with introductions or a boring roll call. He dropped his bag onto the oak desk, turned around, and looked directly out at the tiered rows of students.
“Why do we read things that make us feel like we are breaking apart?”
His voice was clear and resonant, cutting through the low murmur of the hall instantly. He leaned against the edge of the podium, locking his gaze with the front rows. “If literature is supposed to be a comfort, why are the most enduring stories always the ones that leave us bleeding on the floor?”
I sat up a little straighter, my coffee completely forgotten.
“I’m Julian,” he said, offering a brief, sharp smile that didn’t quite reach his intense eyes. “I’m a graduate student and a Teaching Assistant, and for the next ten weeks, we are going to stop treating poetry like a set of historical facts. We are going to treat it like an open wound.”
For the next fifty minutes, I was completely captivated. Julian wasn’t a stuffy, boring professor who spent the hour droning on about dates and old formatting rules. He spoke about the romantic poets with a raw intensity that filled the entire room. He paced back and forth in front of the chalkboard, using his hands to emphasize points, pulling apart hidden meanings in the text that I had never even considered in all my years of advanced English classes.
When he broke down a stanza from a Sylvia Plath poem, explaining how the imagery of winter wasn’t just about the weather but about the psychological isolation of grief, my breath caught in my throat. I couldn’t stop writing notes. My pen was flying across the page, my mind racing to keep up with the way he analyzed the lines. It was a completely different level of thinking than high school, and I was entirely gripped by it.
“That’s all for today,” Julian announced as the campus clock tower began to chime twelve. “Read the next three chapters of the anthology before Thursday, and think about why the authors choose to hide their heaviest truths between the lines.”
The hall immediately erupted into a cacophony of shuffling papers, zipping backpacks, and scraping chairs.
“Wow,” Maya breathed beside me, shoving her notebook into her bag. “He is intense. I think I forgot to breathe for half of that lecture. Are you ready to grab some lunch?”
“You go ahead,” I said, my voice sounding a little distant even to myself. I looked down at my neat rows of notes and then looked back down toward the podium where Julian was casually stacking his books. “I want to ask him a quick question about the reading list.”
“Suit yourself. I’ll be in the courtyard,” Maya said with a knowing smirk before heading up the tiered steps with the rest of the crowd.
I waited until the front area had completely cleared out before I stood up. My knees felt a little shaky, and a sudden wave of nervousness washed over me as I clutched my notebook to my chest. I walked slowly down the wooden steps, my flats silent against the floor, until I stopped right beside the large oak podium.
Julian was zipping up his messenger bag, but he paused and looked up when he noticed me standing there.
“Hi,” I said, clearing my throat to find my confidence. “I just wanted to say that I really shared your view on the hidden themes in the Plath stanzas. The idea that she uses structural boundaries to represent her internal confinement… it was brilliant. I’d never looked at it that way before.”
Julian stared at me for a brief second, his expression unreadable, and then a genuine, bright smile broke across his face. He leaned back against the desk and crossed his arms over his chest, regarding me with a sudden look of interest.
“Most freshers just ask me if the seminar material is going to be on the final exam,” he said, his tone warm and engaging. “It’s refreshing to meet someone who is actually reading between the lines on day one. What’s your name?”
“Paris,” I said, gaining a bit more grounding. “Paris Bennett.”
“Well, Paris,” Julian said, nodding thoughtfully. “You’re entirely right about the structural boundaries. Most critics focus purely on the vocabulary, but Plath was obsessed with control. She forced her chaos into strict stanzas because she couldn’t control her reality.”
We stood there for the next ten minutes, completely lost in an engaging conversation about books. We moved from Plath to the romantic poets, exchanging thoughts on symbolism and tone. It was strictly academic, but it was the most intellectually stimulating conversation I had ever had. For the first time since arriving in York, I felt a rush of pure excitement about my future here. I felt like I actually belonged in these lecture halls.
“I have a seminar to get to,” Julian finally said, glancing at his watch with a look of genuine regret. He swung his messenger bag over his broad shoulder and picked up his last folder. “But I’m looking forward to reading your first analytical essay, Paris. Keep thinking like this, and you’re going to do very well here.”
“Thank you, Julian,” I said, offering a polite nod.
“See you on Thursday,” he said with a friendly smile before turning and walking out of the lecture hall with a purposeful stride.
I stood by the podium for a moment longer, a lingering rush of intellectual energy warming my chest. I closed my notebook and headed out toward the courtyard to find Maya.