For nearly a decade after graduation I wrote lingering, suggestive letters to my upper-middle-aged college Latin professor. He had a wardrobe of tweed, a bicycle he rode around campus, and a tic where he would hold his mouth open and move his jaw from side to side while staring at a wall. He also had a wife.

I will refer to him simply as Professor, not so much to protect his privacy as in recognition of the fact that he could have been almost anybody — he was just the one who was there. Having recently transitioned from a central Florida high school to my first real academic setting, I was intellectually overstimulated and sexually frustrated because it seemed that the only men available to me were all of a type — an overgrown version of the high school boys I had been so dismissive of who would swarm to our college from surrounding towns with the (often correct) assumption that there were desperate women to be had. Thus, after a few passing crushes, unsuspecting Professor became the sole object of my unerring, all-consuming affection, attention, and desire.

Before I proceed any further I want to make it very clear that Professor never gave me the least encouragement nor behaved with anything but the utmost professionalism, to my disappointment and disgust. This was in the early 2010s before #MeToo, and I was an attractive co-ed desperately seeking to be taken advantage of. Professor had obvious favorites among the students in our small department but I was not one of them. I can still feel my visceral envy of a friend, who was gay and had a girlfriend, whom Professor clearly liked very much. Meanwhile, she knew how I felt and would intentionally relate to me conversations they had had or anecdotes from a pilot summer program to Greece in which he had selected her to participate, and which I had not even learned about until the school year started back up. Writing this now I see that she wasn’t very much of a friend at all. Nevertheless, she had something I wanted.

There was another, incredibly beautiful girl with dark hair, tan skin, and bright green eyes. Her name was Elissa, which happened to be the alternate name for Dido the Queen of Carthage, with whom Aeneas falls in love. This irony was not lost on me as I watched Professor staring at her — always a little too long — when she translated passages in our Virgil class. At some point I learned that she and Professor would have coffee every Tuesday and Thursday after the class and I was so envious I thought I was going to throw up. She, too, had been invited to Greece where it apparently became clear that she was something of a real-life queen, very preppy and unconcerned with others, and was sent to the hospital for the severe blisters she acquired while hiking a mountain in boat shoes. To my knowledge this ended the coffee dates, but by that time my heart was already broken.

When I reached graduation I felt a keen sense of loss knowing I was on the brink of relinquishing him from my life. For the past two and half years I had fallen asleep thinking about this man almost every night, spurred by the very minor gratification of spending an hour and half with him in class twice a week, but soon I wouldn’t even have that. The loss I anticipated was unfathomable.

That last week of school the above-mentioned not-really friend and I took Professor out for drinks at a local brewery, which was nice but obviously not everything I wanted it to be. How could it have been? After Professor refused a second round of drinks, he drove us both home and dropped me off first (intentionally, I am sure). He gave me a car side-hug goodbye and, to my surprise, a kiss on the cheek. I flew back to my dorm swift as Mercury himself and wrote the first letter.

I don’t remember exactly what I wrote. I know I felt a small thrill knowing that I could theoretically say whatever I wanted to because I would no longer be facing any institutional repercussions. Indeed, whatever it was that I wrote was inappropriate enough that I regretted posting it to his home address where his wife might have intercepted the mail. I did not get a letter back.

Thereafter I addressed the letters to his office out of precaution. It didn’t take more than a letter or two before I really let myself go, on what would become a years’ long harassment campaign. Fantasy became my creative outlet. After graduation I moved to Paris where I would write to describe my life and the scenery and how his explanation that one class of the Roman Lupercal celebration as “gentle whipping in the forum and whether or not you could attend was probably between a girl and her mother,” was the most erotic moment of my young life. I told him I was taking a course in Latin elegy at the Sorbonne and that his voice sounded like Marlon Brando’s in Last Tango in Paris… no response. Never a response.

I sent a letter every few months, sometimes fewer and sometimes more. I sent letters from different countries, and always kept sealing wax on hand during my myriad travels. I scented them with perfume. I always signed them Sophia Discipula Optissima (SDO for short), meaning “Sophia, most excellent student,” which I certainly never had been. I concluded each letter with an entreaty for a reply.

Eventually my letters petered out. Even an eccentric such as myself could only sustain a one-sided conversation for so long — professing, as it were, into the void. By then I had an age appropriate boyfriend, yet I still hadn’t forgotten Professor. He represented the man I could never have, whom I would in any case never see again.

That’s what I thought, anyway. Four years after college, repatriating upon completion of my Master’s degree and ready to set out for law school, I needed to pass through my old college town. I worked up the nerve to send a joint email to both Professor and my former research director as a buffer. I invited them to meet me for drinks some afternoon. To my delight but also terror, they both accepted.

I had the same butterflies in my stomach as I used to get before the end-of-year Classics department barbeque that Professor hosted every year, the most recent gathering to which I had rolled up in a car, windows down, blasting “Don’t Stand So Close To Me.” It was the kind of nervousness fueled entirely on possibility devoid of any extinguishing logic.

The three of us arrived at the pub and went to the bar to order drinks. The research director didn’t drink so he went to get a table. As soon as he was out of earshot, Professor turned to me and said, “Why did you stop writing? Your letters were great.”

The rest of the meeting was a blur. We only had one round before parting ways genially and the letters began again. Words flowed from my pen like water through an aqueduct along the Appian way, so emboldened was I by the feedback I had received. I still had Professor on such a pedestal that I couldn’t even imagine he would care to hear from me. After all, I was no Elissa. But he was reading my letters! He was reading them and he liked them!

Somehow I was still surprised when he never wrote back.

Eventually, about eight years after it all began, I sent a final letter. It was an apology. I was sorry if I had made him uncomfortable or disrespected his marriage and that I had not managed to handle my own emotions very gracefully. I was grateful for his patience and had the utmost respect for him as an academic and a person. Thanks very much and see him around one day maybe, yours truly, SDO.

Thereafter I sent a few emails, always jointly addressed to the two professors, detailing my life, my travels, how I hated law school, how I quit my law job, how I bought a motorcycle and got my nose pierced. He emailed back a few times, always cordial but never interested, until that stopped too. And while I had been able to sustain letter writing without answers for the better part of a decade, not getting a response to an email somehow seemed unbearably humiliating.

Now I am 31 and have had several happy relationships since I first stumbled from his car after that collegiate kiss on the cheek. I think about Professor almost never but when I do it isn’t really him I think about so much as the role I had invented for him in my life, which I committed to for years at the expense sometimes of my sanity and frequently of my dignity. I was looking for something, some confidence or self-love, or whatever quality it is that I eventually found to give me a bit of peace.

I dream about him every once in a while. In the dreams I am back at college visiting and I am looking for him, in the library, in a classroom, in his office, but he isn’t there. And I see now that he was never there. I had been writing to a figment of my imagination, to feel like I was part of something meaningful even as I simultaneously searched for something tangible, betraying my subconscious knowledge that Professor was only a shade of a promise I had made to myself but couldn’t keep. In time I grew bored of my exquisite Tantalean suffering. I gave up pears entirely.

If you are reading this, Professor, thanks for being there. You helped me to understand myself. It isn’t too late to send me a reply. In fact I would love it if you did. I just don’t want you to be too disappointed if I don’t write back.