The leaves began to fall in mid-October, softening the campus with their muted rust and gold. It was a quiet surrender, almost unnoticed unless you were paying attention. I had long since stopped noticing things like that. My mind rarely made space for beauty anymore,not when it was crowded with deadlines, thoughts that wouldn't sit still, and the strange weight of always pretending I was okay.
That morning, I'd skipped breakfast again. I told myself I'd grab something after my morning seminar, but I knew I wouldn't. I'd already memorized the walk from my flat to the Literature department building,twelve minutes if I didn't take the stairs too fast. I wore the same gray coat I'd been meaning to replace for three seasons now. But October wasn't cold yet, only suggestive.
I saw her again for the first time that month just outside the café. She was sitting at a corner table, typing on her laptop with her back straight and shoulders tense, as if each keystroke was an act of defiance. She didn't see me. Not really. She looked up once, briefly, the way people do when they sense a shadow passing by. But she didn't see me.
Her name came to me like a line from a book I'd once underlined: Arielle Nyambura.
It had been months since our first meeting months since that strange, brief afternoon where words had fallen into silence between us. I remembered her eyes, the way she blinked slowly before answering questions, as if she weighed every response like a secret.
I thought I'd imagined the intensity of that moment. But there she was again.
And now, I started seeing her everywhere.
I didn't speak to her. Not once.
But I started altering my path,subtly at first. Taking detours past the café where I knew she sometimes wrote. Sitting in the library an hour longer than necessary in case she passed by. It was harmless, I told myself. Curiosity. Recognition. Nothing more.
But it wasn't harmless.
It was compulsive.
She had this quiet energy that made everything else blur out. And in a world where I was slowly unraveling, where my own thoughts came with an ache, seeing her was like anchoring myself to something real. She reminded me of who I was before the hollowed-out days, before I started dissociating in lecture halls, before the silence in my own head became unbearable.
The nights were the hardest.
Sleep didn't come easily anymore. I'd lie in bed staring at the ceiling, the cracks in the paint resembling constellations I couldn't name. I'd think about the seminar papers I hadn't marked, the essays I hadn't written for my own doctorate. I was a TA in the Literature department, a position that sounded impressive on paper. But in truth, I was fraying. Most days, I felt like a spectator in my own life.
Sometimes, I hallucinated sounds,footsteps approaching my door, voices whispering things I couldn't quite decipher. I knew enough to recognize the symptoms. I wasn't delusional. Just exhausted. There's a thin line between burnout and breakdown, and I was dancing on it like a tightrope walker in a storm.
But then I'd remember Arielle. The way her fingers hovered over her keyboard before committing to the next word. The way she'd once laughed softly at something someone had said, even though I only heard a few seconds of it, it was the best thing I'd heard in a while . Her laugh lingered longer in my memory than most things. It became a small warmth I clung to.
I kept a journal I never wrote in. It was meant for poetry once. Now it was a time capsule of guilt.
Once, I scribbled something:
"There's a girl who writes like she's trying to save herself. And I keep watching her, not because I want to be seen but because she reminds me what it's like to try."
I didn't sign it. I never do.
The hallucinations worsened in the later part of the year. I started dreaming of her. Not in romantic ways,but strange, fragmentary images. Her in a hallway filled with mirrors. Her walking away from me in the rain. Her turning back, but her face was blank, unreadable.
I'd wake up sweating, gasping like I'd drowned in air.
Once, I saw her in a corridor at the department building, and I nearly said her name aloud. But the words died in my throat. She was with another student, laughing at something on their phone. I felt absurd,like a ghost haunting a stranger.
And yet, I couldn't stop.
There's a concept in literature,the observer effect. The act of observing something inherently changes it. I started to wonder if I was changing her in some invisible way just by watching. I hated the thought. She deserved space, freedom, the right to move through the world without being tethered to someone else's obsession.
So I tried to stop.
But obsession doesn't listen to reason. It feeds on voids.
I started sketching again in a notebook meant for lecture notes. Not faces,just outlines. Hair tied in a low bun. A figure hunched over a laptop. Eyes filled with unspoken things. It wasn't art. It was memory.
And guilt.
I wasn't in love with her. It wasn't that. It was deeper, more wounded. I envied her. Envied her ability to sit in public and work. To fight through whatever darkness she carried by writing. I'd stopped writing long ago. Words failed me. And in her, I saw someone still trying.
I started writing again because of her.
Fragments. Sentences that didn't fit together yet. But they came.
At the end of the year, I saw her one last time before everything shifted.
She was in the campus bookstore, leafing through a poetry collection by Warsan Shire. Her fingers paused on a page, and she read something under her breath. I was two aisles away, pretending to browse. I never saw what poem she read.
But that day, for the first time, she saw me.
Maybe?
Her gaze held mine for three seconds. Long enough to make my chest cave in. There was no smile. No shock.
And in that moment, I wasn't invisible.
I left before I could ruin it. I walked out into the wind, breathing like I'd been underwater for hours. Something in me broke that day. Not in a bad way. In a way that let light in.
It was the beginning of something.
Maybe beginning of a new year?
Not love. Not yet.
But something.