To the Previous Owner of My Used Mrs. Dalloway

You underlined in pencil, mostly—then, somewhere past the middle, switched to ink, so I know the exact page where this book stopped being an assignment. You wrote yes eleven times. Once, oh no. Nothing beside the flowers. Beside Septimus, one small hard-pressed star I've decided means you knew somebody too. We'll never meet; that's the arrangement. You loved this thing and left it, and I came after like a tenant finding pencil ticks climbing a doorframe: someone was measured here, someone was growing. I add my notes beneath yours, smaller, in the hush you use to speak in a room where something true has just been said.