Chapter Text
The first day of the seminar, Hamlet was fifteen minutes late. He slipped into the room with a practiced nonchalance, and took the only remaining seat: a hard-backed chair directly across the circular table from a young man with steady, unimpressed eyes. The late September light fell in pale rectangles across a stack of syllabi, and the professor, a silver-haired man with a mournful, whiskered face, was already reading aloud.
“The time will come
when, with elation,
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror…”
Hamlet set his bag down with a soft, deliberate thud and scanned the room. Ten students, maybe eleven. The eager girl with two different colours of highlighter. The lacrosse player who’d mistaken this for an easy elective. A handful of interchangeable English majors. And then— him. The one who wasn’t looking away. He had dark hair, cut without vanity, and his shoulders were set in an unusually still line. A single ballpoint pen sat on the table in front of him. Nothing else: no phone, no laptop. A library copy of Walcott’s collected poems, its spine cracked with use, lay next to it. He was watching Hamlet with the neutral, patient attention of someone who had been waiting to see what the fuss was about.
Hamlet smiled, the quick, bright blade of a smile that usually made people flinch or flush. The young man did neither. He just held his gaze for a beat longer before returning to the professor, who was still reading.
“…and each will smile at the other’s welcome,
and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.”
The professor closed the book gently. “Derek Walcott,” he said. “The first part of ‘Love After Love.’ And our first poem. I’d like to begin the semester with it because, at its core, it’s a poem about the self — and this seminar is called ‘The Lyric and the Self.’ Which I would hope you saw in the course pdf.” A soft ripple of sycophantic laughter. “But more than that, it’s a poem about return, about sitting down with the person you’ve been running from. So before we get into the thick of scansion, I want to ask you a simple question. What do you make of it?”
There was a predictable silence, where everyone was waiting for someone else to be smart or stupid first. Hamlet let it stretch just long enough to become uncomfortable and then leaned back in his chair.
“Well,” he said, “it’s a lie, isn’t it?”
The professor’s eyebrows rose, encouraging. “A lie?”
“A seductive one. ‘You will love again the stranger who was your self.’” Hamlet quoted the line with a faint curl of his lip, as though wiping something off the rim of a glass. “It presumes there’s some stable, lovable core waiting underneath all the wreckage. Some authentic self you’ve just, hell, misplaced. Like keys. But what if there isn’t? What if the stranger who arrives at your door is exactly that: a stranger. What if you meet yourself and feel nothing at all? Or worse: what if you feel disgust?”
The eager girl with the highlighters scribbled something. The lacrosse player looked relieved that someone else was talking. Hamlet waited, enjoying the slight shift in the room’s gravity. He’d made his entrance; now he wanted to see who would push back.
“What if you do?” The voice came from across the table, level and unspectacular. The dark-haired young man hadn’t moved, but his attention was fully on Hamlet now. “Meet yourself and feel disgust, that is. Does that actually invalidate the poem, or does it just mean you’re not at the feast yet?”
Hamlet’s smile sharpened. “It means the feast is a fantasy. All that — ‘Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart to itself’ — is just self-help scantily clad in metaphor. The heart isn’t a library book. It's not something you can just return.”
“Maybe not.” The reply came without heat, almost thoughtful. “But the poem isn’t about returning something you borrowed. It’s about recognising something you’ve abandoned. ‘You will love again the stranger who was your self.’ See, the word isn’t ‘love’ in the simple present; it’s ‘will love.’ Future. It’s a process, a re-acquaintance, perhaps a process of re-acquaintance. It's the estrangement that's the problem, and not the stranger.”
A few students shifted in their seats, sensing the air tighten. The professor, simply folded his hands and watched, eyes bright with the pleasure.
“Estrangement.” Hamlet tasted the word. “You sound like someone who’s spent a lot of time being estranged.”
“I think everyone has,” the young man said. “Unless they’ve never undergone anything that made them want to crawl out of their own skin.” He paused, and then, with the driest flicker of humour: “But I’m sure you aren't aware of such sensations.”
A tiny, startled laugh escaped someone down the table. Hamlet’s eyes, grey and winter-cold, held the other man’s. “And you are?”
“Horatio.”
Now that did prompt an almost-laugh, but he recovered himself discreetly. “Just Horatio?”
“For the purposes of this class, yes.” Horatio’s tone didn’t change. Rather than being rude, he was simply declining to be impressed. “And you’re Hamlet. I read the roster, and as far as I'm aware, there's only one peson enrolled in a literature seminar instead of finishing the business track their family expected.”
The room went very still. Hamlet’s public biography — son of the late CEO of Elsinor Corp, nephew and heir-apparent to the man who now ran i t— was not something people usually wieldly so baldly. But Horatio said it as if it were just another fact, no more or less significant than the title of a book.
“I see my reputation precedes me,” Hamlet said softly. “Should I be flattered?”
“I don’t know. Should you?”
Before Hamlet could answer, the professor cleared his throat with gentle finality. “This is an excellent beginning,” he said, as though he’d just watched a pair of promising prizefighters trade jabs in the first round. “I’d like to keep up this energy. In fact, I’m going to make it official. For the semester-long critical dialogue that forms the backbone of your grade, I’ll be pairing you two: Hamlet, Horatio. You’ll be responsible for presenting counter-readings of each poem we study, engaging in written exchange, and eventually co-leading a discussion. I think you’ll find the friction rather productive.”
Hamlet’s expression flickered from annoyance to amusement. Horatio simply looked at the professor, then back at Hamlet, and gave a single, almost imperceptible nod. Resignation without surrender.
The rest of the class passed in a blur of safer observations. The eager girl made a point about mirrors and Lacan. The lacrosse player attempted a metaphor about self-love as protein powder and was gently redirected. Hamlet contributed nothing else, just sat with his arms crossed and his eyes flicking occasionally to Horatio, who took a few spare notes with his cheap pen and didn’t look up again.
After the dismissal, the students dispersed into the hallway in clusters, already forming the temporary alliances of a new semester. Hamlet moved through them like a fish swimming upstream, head high, and caught up with Horatio at the entrance to the campus coffee shop, where a line of caffeine-dependent bodies snaked toward the counter.
“Horatio,” he said, falling into step beside him. “Just Horatio. You never did explain how you know my academic history.”
Horatio didn’t break stride. “You’re the largest donor’s son. Your face was in the alumni magazine when your father died. Forgive me if it's not secret knowledge.”
“And yet you wielded it like a weapon.”
“I wielded it like a fact. You were the one who treated the poem like a battlefield.” Horatio joined the back of the coffee line, and Hamlet, after a pause, stood beside him.
“The poem is a battlefield,” Hamlet said. “What an oddly pretentious thing to say about one. They all are. You bring yourself to them, and they either let you in or gut you.” He leaned against the wall, watching the steam rise from the espresso machine. “‘You will love again the stranger who was your self.’” He tried to catch Horatio's eye. “Do you really believe that? That you can sit down with whatever’s left of you after the big rupture and just, I don't know, feast?”
Horatio considered the question. Around them, the coffee shop clattered with the ordinary music of cups and conversation. “I don’t know if I believe it,” he said finally. “But I think it might be true. As a possibility, if not a promise. A door you can walk through if you’re willing to face the room on the other side.”
“And what if the room is empty?”
“Then you’re still inside it.” Horatio’s voice was quiet, but it didn’t waver. “Still preferable to being out in the cold.”
Hamlet looked at him. Really looked, the way he hadn’t allowed himself to in class. Horatio’s face was composed, but not closed. It was unsettling. It was also, Hamlet realised with a jolt that travelled all the way down his spine, the first time in months he’d felt genuinely seen by someone who wasn’t trying to fix him, flatter him, or flee.
He opened his mouth to deliver the final, witty, deflecting line that would restore the distance between them. But what came out instead was, “You say that like you’ve never tried.”
Horatio’s expression shifted — just a fraction, a softening at the corner of his mouth. “I didn’t say that.”
The line moved. Hamlet realised he hadn’t ordered anything, that he’d just followed Horatio here like a moth tracking a light. The realization made him feel foolish, then angry at his own foolishness, then abruptly, inexplicably tired. He didn’t have a retort. The poem’s last lines were still echoing in his head: Sit. Feast on your life. He thought of his apartment, the kitchen where he ate standing up, the mirror he avoided in the mornings. He thought of the stranger who had been his self before his father died, the one who used to laugh without thinking about who was in his presence as he laughed, and for how long. Who hadn’t yet learned to turn every conversation into a duel.
Horatio reached the counter and ordered a plain black coffee. He paid with a crumpled five-dollar bill, exact change, and when he turned, he found Hamlet still standing there, unmoving, the sharp edges of him gone momentarily blunt.
“You didn’t get anything,” Horatio observed.
“I’m not thirsty.”
“Yes, you are.” Horatio held his gaze for another of those long, unblinking moments. Then he lifted his coffee cup in a small, almost ceremonial gesture. “Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart to itself.” He recited it without irony, and then walked away into the afternoon crowd.
Hamlet stood there, feeling a crack open somewhere deep in the carapace he’d built. It was the half-painful, half-eager sensation of a door swinging wide onto a room he hadn’t entered in years. The stranger who was his self was in there.
And for the first time, he wondered if he might have a guest at the feast.