I don’t sleep. I can’t, in fact.
Every calm breath feels wrong. Every sound outside makes me listen harder.
I even push the premise of the third step, messaging the help with extra information just so I can know she heard from me. If the information gets delivered, I don’t know. I’m almost tempted to double down and reveal all the details of her Step 3, but this would be too soon.
She is somewhere, and that means I can get her back. There is a ghost out there, a variable I no longer hold, and it devours every moment of my existence.
Day Five. Lecture Day.
I arrive early—a change in the pattern—after I spent two hours getting ready like my appearance somehow suddenly matters—change two. I ran through my slides four times, point by point, to make sure it’s perfect—the trifecta of obsession. She will be here, and I have a plan on how to bring her back into my experiment.
The hall echoes strangely, full of indistinct faces. All I do is look for her. I look for her repeatedly, but she’s not here.
Sixth row, left side. That seat is empty, of course. But that doesn’t stop my eyes from flicking back to the door. Every time someone enters late, I find myself holding my breath for a moment. Just in case she might suddenly walk in, wearing that infernal mask of disdain, like none of it ever happened or affected her. And every time she doesn’t, I feel the pit in my stomach growing bigger and bigger until I start considering that I might actually be sick. When did I last eat, anyway?
The lecture is again perfect, timed to the second. Brilliant, efficient, and utterly useless. My assistants take notes. One student even asks a semi-decent question.
But every time my brain forgets for a brief second that she’s not here, the empty seat stares back at me from the other side of the room and the sensation hits me like a tsunami, ten times worse than before.
Nothing.
It almost feels like she’s doing it on purpose, to teach me a lesson. Like she’s erasing herself from my life just so I can beg her to return.
And I hate how this idea sounds less pathetic by the minute.
Because for the first time in a very long time, I have something to lose.
Five days turn into six, then into seven days of silence, and every one of them is louder than the previous one.
There is no more structure in my life now—only the illusion of a human being with an empty core. The emails and the days blur into each other, the lectures deliver themselves and the foodI force myself to eat tastes like chalk. I stopped counting the days on the calendar, and started counting the days since she went missing.
But on the seventh day, the desperation turns into obsession and the obsession into the need to see her.
She has rituals, my little ember. Even her chaos craves my sort of structure. Every Saturday, like clockwork, she picks up wine. Same corner store. Same relative hour. I noticed it before, when I was studying her. A meaningless tick that seemed useless to remember—until now. Now it is a thread I could pull, something I could use.
I stand across the street from her apartment, waiting for her.
I observe every person who enters the building, every set of eyes that could potentially watch me from her window, every move inside that I could detect. Nothing moves.
Every woman I see with a similar walk twists my stomach into knots before I get close enough to see it’s not her. Wrong height. Wrong hair. Wrong shoes. Wrong everything.
I planned to stay ten minutes. Since I’ve already been here for twenty-eight, there’s nothing wrong with staying forty. All I do is wait and wait until the possibility of her not showing up becomes reality and I finally embrace the idea of giving up on sanity.
She is gone, truly gone. Not just missing for a few days, not just retreating. Gone like a shadow burned off the surface of the earth. And I did that. I pushed her so far, she no longer wishes to be herself. I’d destroyed her edge by edge, fracture by fracture—and now there’s nothing left for me to hold.
I pointlessly hoped she would claw her way back to curse me, to perform a final act, but it seemed she’d outgrown me.
It feels like I’ve been dismissed.
I always thought breakdowns were noisy and violent. The shattering of glass, the screaming into mirrors, collapsing to the ground under your own weight.
Turns out, mine is quiet.
It feels like every morning I’m not actually waking up, just resurfacing from something dark and still and restless.
The light in the apartment is the wrong kind of white, the bedsheets have the wrong texture of silk, and all the sounds around are too noisy. I haven’t left my room in days, and all my classes have been canceled until further notice.
My body stinks of unwashed skin and sour clothes, but I don’t care. I stopped caring days ago, right around the moment I stopped wasting energy moving and just sat, staring at the empty ceiling, letting the silence scream louder than I ever could.