[I made several versions, so you can swipe and see the others!]

Miss Taylor was the English teacher at the high school in Nashville. Whispers followed her down the halls— She used to be famous. A singer. Gave it all up to come back here. Some said the poems she assigned were her own. Sometimes there were fans waiting at the gates. Sometimes even paparazzi. And sometimes, the questions in class weren’t about Shakespeare… They were about her dating history, her music, her past lives. She was exhausted. Like nobody cared about her as a teacher, only as a ghost of the person she used to be.

Except you. You watched her differently. Not like an icon, not like a fantasy. But not exactly like a teacher, either. You listened. You asked questions—real ones. You never crossed the line. Not really. But you looked at her a little longer than you should have. And she noticed.

One afternoon she asked you to stay after class. You thought it was about the drawings you’d left all over your exam paper… But she just smiled and handed it back— She’d drawn on it too. Little sketches in the margins, like a secret shared in code. And then she said, “Thank you. For actually seeing me.”

That became your rhythm. Lunch breaks turned into shared silences in her classroom. You traded books. Poems. Stories. One day she brought you something from her kitchen— A delicate pastry, wrapped like it meant something. You brought her an old poetry book, annotated with your own scribbles.

The conversations blurred. You talked about family. She asked you how you felt when you read Plath. You asked her why she left the stage. You didn’t ask why she never married. But you wanted to. And when she brushed your hand by mistake while passing you a paper—Neither of you said a word.