There was someone she liked.And not just liked in passing—but deeply, helplessly. What had started as a silly obsession had become something softer, sweeter, and far more dangerous. Infatuation. It clung to her like perfume. And it was cute, in the way heartache often is when it's still new. He was perfect—exactly the kind of person she'd dreamed of. If anyone ever asked her about her ideal type, she would've just pointed at him. Simple.
The only problem was, He didn't care. Not even a little.
And maybe... maybe that was part of the charm.
If someone asked her to define what it looked like for someone to be in love, she'd just tell them to look into her eyes—right now. Not because he was handsome or ideal in the way the world measured people, but because something in the way he spoke, the way he moved, the way he existed, had reached something sacred in her.
Oddly enough, when she saw his face today—she wasn't even sure it was him. He looked different from the image she had etched into memory. For a brief moment, she was convinced she had been mistaken all along.
But no—it wasn't about his face.It never had been.
It was the voice. The presence. The depth.And now, she was tangled in it.
She didn't even trust her feelings anymore. This wasn't fiction—it couldn't be. She wasn't the heroine of some story. But she did feel like a ghost that kept returning to the same places. And maybe, just maybe, he recognized her by now. Or maybe he'd simply noticed how often she drifted near.
When she had arrived earlier, he'd been sitting outside. She'd mirrored him, sitting with a book she never truly opened, pretending to read while watching the edge of his world. He hadn't looked at her. He never did. And maybe that's what made it so intoxicating.
She, on the other hand, had done things she couldn't defend—small, embarrassing things. The kind that later made her wince. He had gone back inside. Ten minutes later, so had she. The order of things blurred after that. She remembered seeing him take the stairs at one point, maybe going upstairs. She'd wanted to write something poetic. The word "gliding" had crossed her mind, maybe as a metaphor. But her laptop battery was dying. So she'd gone to Zuhra to charge it. There was a socket near the computer room.
She'd planned to sit there, maybe write, maybe just exist again near where he had once been.
But—She didn't.