jinx

It started in the quietest hour, the kind of silence that feels deliberate, as if the world itself had stepped outside for a cigarette and forgotten to come back.

Room 505 smelled faintly of detergent and the cold metal of the radiator. The fluorescent light above her buzzed in that way that always made her nervous—like something was about to snap. She sat on the edge of her bed, legs pulled to her chest, the message still open on her phone, its glow shaping her face into something hollow and too young to be this tired.

The words blurred sometimes, but she didn’t need to read them again. They were written in her bones by now: You are right, I am not in love with you...

She somehow blamed herself. What if I didn't say anything, what if I didn't ask those questions... As it was ever about her heart.

Her hands trembled, and she pressed her palms to her forehead as if she could push the thoughts back inside—like the pressure alone could keep her from cracking. But the feelings leaked anyway, fast and contradictory, like water through old wood. One moment she wanted to curl into herself until she became small enough to disappear; the next she wanted to tear the room apart just to prove she still had force left in her body.

She laughed once, short and broken, at how ridiculous she must look. Anyone else would cry normally. She envied them. Yet she knew it was about to come at her doorstep.

The room was dim except for the lamp on her desk, where notebooks and unfinished thoughts lay scattered like casualties. She had tried to study earlier, but her mind had been a wet match—nothing caught. The campus outside the window was still alive, students heading back from late dinners or clubs, some laughing loud enough for their voices to reach her. She hated them for a moment, for not knowing what it was like to be gutted by someone whose heartbeat she’d memorized.

Her heartbeat. His voice in her neck. Those stupid moments of warmth she could not forget. They clung to her like cobwebs.

She wiped her face on her sleeve. It didn’t matter what he said—she had felt him love her. Or maybe she had simply needed someone to love her so desperately that she mistook her own longing for truth. She couldn’t tell anymore. She hated that she couldn’t tell. Her mind built illusions so beautifully sometimes that she walked inside them barefoot.

Her phone buzzed with a notification, but not from him. For a split second, rage flashed white behind her ribs. If he wasn’t going to talk to her, if he wasn’t going to explain what had shattered between them, why had he made her believe anything in the first place? The tenderness she’d written for him earlier—the soft apology, the permission to go, the love—now burned in her throat like something toxic.

How pathetic she had been. How stupidly loyal. How embarrassingly hopeful.

She stood up so fast the bed creaked. The walls of the room seemed to close in, pushing her toward something she didn’t want to feel. Her breath quickened. Her chest tightened. She pressed a fist against her sternum just to remind herself her body was still hers.

He had walked away, simple as that. No warning. No explanation. As if she had been a season he’d enjoyed and then grown tired of.

It made her furious. And it made her love him harder, in the exact same breath. The contradiction tore something inside her, something she’d stitched up a hundred times before.

She grabbed the notebook from her desk and hurled it against the wall. Pages fluttered like startled birds, falling in uneven piles across the floor. For a moment, the noise felt good—felt real. But then the room returned to silence, and she was alone again.

The loneliness scared her more than anything. It always had.

She crouched down, hugging her knees again, her forehead resting on her arms. She hated that she kept caring. She hated that she didn’t know how not to. Every breakup felt like a small funeral; every disappointment felt like betrayal. And yet she kept trying, again and again, as if the next person might finally choose to stay.

Maybe she was broken. Or maybe she was simply someone who loved with her whole, bruised heart, even when the world taught her not to.

Her breath trembled. Tears welled again, softer this time, almost gentle. She let them fall. There was nothing else left to do. The radiator clicked faintly beside her, the room buzzing with its own tired heartbeat.

“Why wasn’t I enough?” she whispered into the fabric of her sleeve, though she already knew the answer.

It wasn’t about enough. It was about being someone whose love came in tidal waves—beautiful, overwhelming, terrifying. Most people weren’t strong swimmers.

Outside the window, a light flicked off in another dorm building. Night settled more heavily around her.

She curled deeper into herself, the two versions of her—loving and furious, hopeful and wounded—pressing against each other like rival ghosts inside her ribcage.

This was neither how the story began nor end, in the dimness of Room 505, with a girl who loved too hard and broke too loudly, sitting alone on the cold floor and trying to figure out how to survive losing someone she had only just begun to trust.

It has happened before. Every single time, in fact.

Only if there could be a way to numb all the pain, erase all that she once loved and couldn't let go...

And the night, cruel as truth, offered no answers.

She couldn't sleep.

Whilst he didn't care.