For all intents and purposes, she supposed, mathematics was quite possibly the dullest subject on the face of God’s green Earth. Looking around herself, subtly so to not attract the wrath of the professor, the teenaged girl observed her classmates, with their mixed expressions of boredom, slight interest, and rapt attention, from the equally apathetic to the overly eager — in her opinion, at least. Trigonometry, she thought, was not meant to be admired or cared for, it was merely for study and understanding, then to be sentenced to the fog of lost memory. She was, this day more than others and for reasons she kept secret and dwelled upon too heavily, feeling very poetic.
The seat in front of her was empty. It seemed lonely, and it gave off an aura of vacuum, a sensation that everything in the world was missing which was felt when one looked upon it and saw that it was unoccupied. Unoccupied, unnoticeably: an unjustified cruelty, in a sense, and a shame, a tragedy. There was a decidedly tragic characteristic about an empty desk, she decided, and she went to scrawling prose in the margins of her paper about it.
She would write a poem, she thought, later on when the mood for those kinds of words struck her the fiercest. That time of day tended to be late in the evening, usually during sunset but sometimes an hour or two earlier. She had observed once, laying next to the thing that was truly missing, that if she traced the figurative lines of her brain, following behind the trains of thought that derailed from the forefront of her conscious, and keeping tabs on the stray, frayed strands of random and spontaneous ideas or emotions that appeared and disappeared, she could find a pattern in it all, something that she theorised defined a portion of her personality, or even was a reason and foundation for it. This was something she lightly considered continuously all the time, taking careful note of when she felt the urge to do what and in what way she moved or lived, wrote or talked. In the end, she concluded that poetry was best left for the setting sun and the afterhours.
Granted, right now, she mused, everything was coming off poetic in her head. But, she knew, from experience, that trying to place that poetry in an external expression would foil it somehow, make it tamer or weaker than it would otherwise be were it written at the right time. She made an analogy in her head, then tossed it aside and promptly forgot it, because trees and fruit were way too overdone by her standards. Pausing in her note-taking and letting her eyes wander in whichever way they desired, she pieced together sentences, verbs with conjunctions and the requisite amount of nouns, in an effort to produce a better simile or, perhaps, metaphor — although, she had discovered, a good metaphor is more precious and rare than a simile.
“Misses Minerva?”
Why did my father give me that name, anyway? . . . Oh, yeah, respond to teacher and pretend to have been listening, right — almost forgot.
“Yes, Miss Evanwoods?”
Not that I don’t like the name, so much as it sticks in my ears and lingers every single time I hear it. Even when it’s not being emphasised or made a big deal about, I feel like it is, like everyone who says it says it way too . . . Too something, I don’t know.
“Are you content to daydream, or would you rather make the taxes your parents put towards the education system worth something and learn a little bit about math?”
She’s always overly political. Everything has to relate to the government or a politician, somehow, with her. I don’t like being all that political, it’s just not worth the worry, the way I see it.
“I’m learning, most assuredly, Miss Evanwoods. I can tell you that that angle is, in fact, thirty degrees, for example.”
She never particularly cared about math, of course, but she did pick it up long enough to get high marks on her exams. Luckily, it didn’t come hard, as it did for many of the other apathetic students whose lackluster approach to the subject was mostly compensation for struggle and ignorance. She didn’t like them, but they didn’t like her, either; therefore, it was an ideal circumstance, for all those involved. Nobody cared, but that’s unsurprising when dealing with apathetic teenagers: nowadays, everybody is burnt-out.
“Okay, Minerva, try to appear as though you are paying attention, though.”
The professor continued with her lecture, and Minerva continued with her brooding. Minerva, Minerva, she repeated in her head, there’s just something unusual about the name. It doesn’t sound right, it doesn’t ring correctly, it doesn’t roll off the tongue smoothly at all, in her view. Sure, maybe the Romans liked it, but she just didn’t.
The abbreviations she endured: that must’ve been it, she realised. Minnie? Who likes being called “Minnie?” Except for some cartoon mouse in a skirt, of course . . . Minnie, mini, miniature, miniature Minerva. Mini-Me and Mini-M&M’s and Mini-Golf. Mini-Minnie.
This is all, she declared to her brain, precisely why I go by my middle name: Eudora, or Dora, alternatively. Nobody names their daughters Eudora or Dora, anymore, so it is a nice throwback to the 40’s or 50’s, for her. It makes it unique, even though unoriginal, which is really all she strove for in existence. She had read somewhere that the truth is that originality is a dead animal, and all good things boil down to unique interpretations of ideas that had been done in the past. Look back at history, she commonly reminded herself, but don’t be history.
She looked at the empty desk that sat before her, again, and mulled on it. There once was someone there, but now he is gone; there will be someone there, but he is not there, yet. Relevant to the past, and pertinent to the future, but not significant in the present: isn’t that how all things seem, she thought, isn’t that how we live our lives?
When that desk is empty, it has the potential to do something, it has the potential to be the spot in which something great occurs, or something miraculous takes place. When it was filled, there was someone there who was doing something, perhaps learning and perhaps being interested in trigonometry. That desk has been and will be part of something greater than itself, alone, for when it is just an empty desk . . . It is a chair and a table attached together by metal. It occupies space, and it looks empty. It inspires girls to think way too much about emptiness, that’s what it does.
She then noted that being interrupted by the teacher derailed her thought pattern and changed its mode. She had been feeling very poetic, but now she was feeling quaintly philosophical and moderately literary. Pausing, she tried to recall the poetry that had swirled about her conscious, appearing in pretty phrases and rhyming ideas — nothing came forth. At sunset, though, she was certain, it would all flood back into her forethoughts. It would all come out of hiding, and start dancing in her head, once more. Now, though, she could only think in terms of theory and postulate: what and how objects affect reality and the individual. The rhythm scheme she had been producing thoughts in was now bland and dry, instructional and didactic instead of whimsical and resounding. The words she thought no longer came out as flowing and elegant, instead they marched forth like soldiers with a mission.
It is odd, she observed, that similes serve me better outside of poetry; in fact, she noticed, they do better to elaborate a point or clarify something which is a bit ubiquitous, thus narrow it all down to a relatable similarity. Metaphorical language, in and of itself, is abstract and possibly difficult to comprehend if one does not follow the analogy, so it has no place in explanatory discussion. A good metaphor in a poem is altogether misplaced in a manifesto or doctrine of theory — they’re already muddled by their nature, no need to throw in further confusion. It made sense, to her.
The empty desk laughed.

[Editor's Note: Yes, this was put up two days late. Sorry.]