Pen Twirling

So the other day I was with a student of mine, sitting at the dining room table in his house, and I had just assigned him a small essay to write. Because I knew that the assignment was going to take him about 15 minutes, right after he put pen to paper, I searched my backpack for something to read. The only thing that I had with me was a German/English workbook. It wasn’t exactly fascinating reading, but I opened it anyway and began to skim the pages. Toward the back of the book, I noticed that there was a list of important English verbs and their German equivalents. I immediately zeroed in on the verb sich verlieben, which means, “to fall in love.” Was sich verlieben, I wondered, any different from verliebt sich or verliebt in dich or verliebt? Was it any different from the verb that she had said? 

That “she" was my ex-girlfriend. Verliebt sich, or a derivative of it, was a verb she used the last time I saw her. 

I had been at her apartment sitting at a small table in her kitchen and had said to her that based on how she had been acting, it seemed as though she were in love with someone else. 

“Das bin ich,” she responded. 

I couldn’t believe my ears. 

“Ich bin verliebt,” she said. 

That just can’t be, I had thought. And I still didn't understand. After all, h—

Thwack! My student's pen hits the paper in front of him. He had been intermittently twirling the thing as he was composing his essay and it had slipped out of his grip. 

“Sorry,” he said.