The Black Notebook in the Library
Most people say that when they start university, they step into a new life and break their chains. Nightclubs, crowded groups of friends, lovers whispering in the corners of lecture halls… Everyone seemed to have snatched a role.
I didn’t feel that way.
For me, there were only buildings with higher ceilings, colder faces, and hundreds of strangers whose names I would never know—nor did I want to know. That was all. Crowds had always felt dangerous to me; because the more people there are, the higher your chances of breaking. I had been looking for a sanctuary since my childhood, and my favorite spot on campus wasn’t those flashy classrooms or the lawns.
It was the library.
Because libraries didn’t speak. The scent of centuries-old dust hidden between the shelves was safer than human voices. No one asked you why you were silent or why you sat all by yourself. No one forced you to join a group, nor did they care about your presence or absence. And most importantly… Nobody noticed you.
It was perfect for me. Invisibility was my greatest armor in this life.
That day, during the break between classes, I had fled from the suffocating crowd and gone straight up to the third floor of the library. This place was like a quiet area of isolation, filled with old encyclopedias and rare windows, where students rarely stopped by. It was almost always empty.
I went and sat at the corner table by the window. I put on my headphones, drowned out all the noise of the outside world with an instrumental melody, and opened my notebook. I didn’t feel like studying or getting lost in the lines of the thick history books in front of me. So, I picked up my pencil and started drawing.
As my pencil moved with a rhythmic friction against the paper, I would completely lose my sense of time. Lines were my words; I would pour everything I couldn’t say onto those papers. Maybe half an hour had passed, maybe an hour. I didn’t know. I was completely lost in the rhythm.
Until I noticed something in the shadow right next to my leg, beneath the table.
A black notebook.
It lay there as if it had fallen to the ground and slid behind the wooden leg of the table. Leaving my pencil on the table, I furrowed my brows. Seeing forgotten items or left-behind lecture notes in the library wasn’t unusual, but this notebook looked different at first glance.
It wasn’t old. It wasn’t new either. The edges of its leather cover were slightly worn, carrying a sense of lived experience, as if it hadn’t left someone’s hands for years and had been constantly carried in pockets and bags. It had a posture as hard and mysterious as steel.
I bent down and picked it up from the floor. As my fingers touched the cold cover, a strange shiver climbed up the back of my neck. Nothing was written on the cover. No name, no department, no student number, or label. Just a pitch-black cover.
For a while, I held the notebook between my two hands. A voice inside told me to hand it over to the staff right then and there. But the other voice, that curious child I always suppressed, proved more dominant. Hoping to catch a clue to find its owner, I parted the cover of the notebook.
There was no name on the first page either. Right in the middle of the page, there was a single sentence written in handwriting:
“A person sometimes knows a stranger better than themselves.”
My brows furrowed a bit more. The writing was harsh, sharp, and angular; yet the meaning it carried was just as deep. This was definitely not a lecture note or exam preparation. I turned the page slowly. A story lay before me. A narrative crafted line by line, like a novel draft.
At first, I only thought about reading a few lines just to get an idea of who the owner was. Then I was going to close it and leave.
But I couldn’t let go. The words practically pulled me in.
Because the boy in the story… looked incredibly like me. At first, I thought it was a simple coincidence, that the writer had created a melancholic character. The character was a quiet person. He didn’t like crowds. He was constantly drawing, fleeing from people at every turn. These were general traits that could fit many introverted students on campus. Trying to calm myself down, I kept reading.
One page. Two pages. Three pages…
Then, as I moved through the handwritten lines, the page beneath my fingertips slowed down. That rhythmic beating beneath my ribcage, the pace of my heart suddenly shifted direction.
Because the boy in the story used to be afraid of thunder and storms when he was little. Not an ordinary fear, but the desire to hide under the bed during those moments when the windows rattled… I was afraid too. And nobody in this world knew this except my mother. I hadn’t told anyone.
Taking a trembling breath, I turned to the next page. My eyes quickly scanned the lines on the page. When the character had a nightmare at night and couldn’t sleep, he always left his room’s door ajar, exactly a span open; because closed doors made him feel like he was running out of breath.
I did exactly that. Every single night.
My throat went completely dry. The music coming from my headphones turned into a rumble from far away. This had now gone beyond being strange or being a coincidence. This was impossible. With that heavy pressure settling on my chest, I read a few more lines.
And at that moment, time stopped completely. Right in the middle of the page, that sentence written with black ink pressed hard onto the paper cut my breath from its roots:
“People thought he was silent. Whereas he just couldn’t find anyone to talk to.”
I slammed the notebook shut. Suddenly. Harshly.
In that heavy silence of the library, the sound of the notebook closing snapped like a slap. I felt as if I had been caught red-handed while committing a hidden sin, while stealing someone’s most intimate secret. Terrified, I raised my head and looked at the deserted corridors of the library, behind the shelves.
There was no one. Only dust motes were drifting around. But inside me, a wild restlessness and sense of danger I couldn’t explain took over all my cells.
This was nonsense. There were billions of people in this world, and it had to be just a creepy coincidence that a character created by a writer carried the same fears and the same habits as me. My logic refused to accept any other explanation. Unless someone was playing a game with me—which, nobody was even aware of my existence—this was just a fluke.
I took a deep, jarring breath. I needed to calm down. The right thing to do was to leave this notebook at the library’s lost and found unit. Yes, I had to do this and rid myself of this madness.
I opened the notebook again on the table. This time, swearing not to look at the story inside, I turned to the first pages, the inside of the cover, solely to search for an official name, a surname, or a clue.
The inside of the cardboard cover appeared completely blank. Just as I was about to close the notebook completely, my eye caught that very small, almost hidden detail in the bottom left corner.
A small letter.
A single letter stamped with black ink, in straight and sharp lines.
M.
And for some reason, in that deadly silence where the music playing in my headphones came to an end, looking at that letter brought a pitch-black, bad feeling crashing down inside me.
As if I should have never picked that notebook up from the floor. As if by opening those pages, I hadn’t just parted the curtain to someone else’s secret world, but also to a dangerous story that would turn my own life upside down.
It was as if I could already feel a hand as hard as steel moving to crumple my life that was as fragile as paper.
To Be Continued...
