I am the Ratu because a stupid, stained, second-hand romance novel at 2 AM can still make me believe in the letter 'A'.

It was terrible. The prose was sticky with words like "throbbing" and "majesty." The hero was a duke who built ships. The heroine was a baker with "hair like a wheat field."

Under my bed, layered in dust and broken dreams of a tidy life, is a cardboard box labeled "Donation." It has sat there for three years. Inside are the books I claimed to hate. The ex-boyfriend’s philosophy tomes. The cookbooks for diets I never started. The novel everyone loved but made me yawn.

There is a particular kind of loneliness that only exists in a rented room at 2 AM. It is not the sad kind. It is the hollow, waiting kind. The kind where the walls breathe and the ceiling fan ticks like a countdown to nothing.

I am keeping the box. And I am buying a red wine later. Just to make a new stain for the next girl.

That rusty stain on page 47? It landed right on the sentence: “He traced the letter ‘A’ on her palm, and for the first time, the world did not feel like a locked door.”

Not a coffee stain. It was a rusty, dried circle. A tear drop? A wine spill from a heartbroken reader before me?

That is when I remembered the box.