Chapter 1
The ceiling rose far above us, austere and cavernous, an institutional firmament paneled in acoustic white. It gave the lecture hall the solemn geometry of a secular cathedral, a place where knowledge, not prayer, was meant to ascend.
Fluorescent fixtures stretched in rigid parallel lines overhead, each one a glass vessel of captive lightning. Their hum was constant, a thin electrical murmur threading through the air like the sound of distant insects. Two, perhaps three had failed. Their tubes were dark, faintly gray at the ends, exhausted. I remembered noticing them months earlier in Introduction to Biology. They remained lifeless through the following semester of Introductory Chemistry. And now, again, they lingered unreplaced — small monuments to institutional inertia, to maintenance deferred, to time passing without intervention.
Dust motes drifted visibly in the artificial light, suspended in convection currents from the ventilation system. The air carried the sterile scent of dry-erase solvent and old paper. Polymer chair backs clicked softly when students shifted their weight. Fabric whispered. Zippers sighed. Ultimately a choreography of minor human noises beneath the steady current of electricity.
It was spring of 2019. The season of cellular renewal. Of lengthening photoperiods and hormonal recalibrations. I wore shorts — pale denim softened by wear — and the exposed skin of my legs registered the room’s cool temperature with quiet precision. My ankles were bare.
That was when I felt it: observation.
Not crude. Not accidental. Sustained.
His gaze rested at the narrow architecture of my ankles — the delicate articulation where tibia met talus, where tendons traced fine tensile lines beneath the skin. A biomechanical hinge. Elegant. Vulnerable. I did not look at him yet, but awareness moved through me like voltage finding a conductive path.
It was then when I noticed him staring under the table underneath me.
Seconds passed. Measurable. Elastic.
Then he began to speak.
As his voice moved through the room, he lifted his eyes to address the class — and in that exact convergence of motion and sound, I looked at him. The timing felt engineered, as if two independent variables had resolved into a single, deliberate event.
My eyes now on his eyes, though he did not look at me directly but into the distance of the room as he spoke.
His irises caught the fluorescent light and returned it altered, not merely reflected, but transformed. The effect was arresting. There was an optical clarity to them, a refraction that felt almost nonhuman in its precision.
Beautiful, I thought.
He would have rejected that word.
“Men don’t have beautiful eyes,” he once told the lecture hall. “Women have beautiful eyes.”
He said it while diagramming the anatomy of vision — while tracing the iris with academic detachment. He explained melanin concentration and photon scattering: how low stromal pigment allows shorter wavelengths of visible light to disperse, producing the structural coloration we perceive as blue; how moderate melanin yields green; how dense melanin absorbs light into the deep spectrum we call brown. Genetics expressing itself through alleles. Genotype rendered visible as phenotype. The molecular choreography behind identity.
Pigment. Light. Perception.
Biology masquerading as poetry.
I wondered — with a kind of clinical innocence — whether men ever looked at women this way on purpose. Whether attention could be staged like an experiment. Whether one person could create a moment that allowed another to observe freely, believing themselves unseen.
I did not know if attraction could ignite that quickly.
But something ignited.
Not only because of the glance.
Because of his voice.
It was not the ornamental fluency people call silver-tongued.
Not the warm persuasion of gold.
It was diamond.
Hard. Precise. Faceted.
Language under pressure, made brilliant.
Why did I plan my death with such quiet administration?
I entered the date into my calendar as if scheduling an exam. A private endpoint, conditional:If the pain does not change.
There was no singular catastrophe. No cinematic collapse. Just cumulative strain, the psychology of slowly breaking.
Academic pressure formed the outer layer. Deadlines. Performance metrics. Cognitive fatigue.
But the nucleus of the pain was relational.
I watched the man I loved construct a life that excluded me.
I remained silent when he married.
Silent when his first son was born.
At night, I lay awake with the radio speaking softly into the dark. He knew the DJ from the rock station — a trivial fact that became, in my mind, an invisible network of proximity. Evidence that he inhabited a world still moving forward, still expanding, while mine contracted.
When I learned of the engagement — the trip to Cancun, the announcement, the photographs — disbelief struck first. Then jealousy, sudden and febrile. I could feel my pulse in my throat, my wrists, my abdomen. Sympathetic nervous system activation. Heat without fever.
Anger surged.
Grief settled.
I met him at twenty-four. We recorded music together — long studio nights threaded with creative voltage. I attended his shows with devotional regularity. At twenty-six, our bands shared a stage.
That same year, he proposed.
That same year, my band dissolved.
Music — once respiratory — became suffocating.
So I turned to subtraction.
Twelve hundred calories.
Six hundred.
Three hundred.
A descending sequence. Intake reduced to arithmetic. Control distilled into numbers. My body responded with predictable efficiency: rapid mass loss, metabolic adaptation, hormonal strain. But I spoke of none of it. Silence became my primary coping mechanism.
The deeper wound was existential: the conviction that I had missed my singular alignment, the person I was meant to build a life with. That love, once lost, was nonrenewable.
So I designed an exit.
Textbooks frame suicide as a response to acute trauma — divorce, financial ruin, sudden bereavement. My suffering was different. It was erosion. Chronic, invisible, cumulative.
I did not feel explosive rage.
Yet the emotional climate around me felt perpetually hostile.
I wanted sensory reduction. Isolation. An end to internal noise.
I had abandoned my faith years earlier. There was no theological counterweight to despair. No doctrine to interrupt the cognition loop. No prayer I trusted to metabolize grief.
I told no one.
I simply intended to disappear.
Remembering it now produces a fragile ache, the emotional equivalent of pressing on an old fracture site.
And somehow, my memory of Professor Menard remains fused to that period of pain. Not causative. Not intentional. But neurologically paired — his presence encoded alongside a season of internal collapse.
The light.
The ceiling.
The hum of electricity.
The deliberate glance.
The diamond voice.
No man has occupied that same psychic space since.
I still analyze the question:
Why.
