Brown paper packages

Today, in the little wooden mail hutch with my name over it, a package via the internal university system. A book from Boy with Yellow Converse, for my birthday. Recalling, dear readers, that he and I have never been in a room unoccupied by at least another half-dozen people, much less been for coffee. Or a movie. Um.

It is second-hand in the best possible way, which is to say bumped but not cocked. And a little scuffed, the warm paperback patina, with none of the sad rust of sunning. He has written on the title page in pencil, in case I don't like inscriptions. Or because he always uses a pencil, maybe. It is Marge Piercy's Woman on the Edge of Time.

I guess I could be a cynic and decide that this is just a shade too ... considered. Even if it is the right kind of considered. But instead, my toes are wriggling in a girly way rather uncomfortably at odds with yesterday's lightsabre wielding.

Or perhaps not.