It wasn’t intentional at first. We shared a campus and somehow never shared the same space. Different paths. Different exits. A quiet choreography I didn’t recognize as deliberate until it already was.
We were still in the same lecture once a week, Engineering 204. The first week after everything broke, people noticed immediately that he didn’t sit next to me anymore. The empty seat between us screamed louder than any whisper.
By the second week, the commentary dulled into background noise.
I took the aisle near the back. He stayed closer to the front. We never looked for each other. We never acknowledged the absence where conversation used to live.
Sometimes I saw him anyway—his profile a few rows down, the color of his voice when he answered questions, deeper and more contained than before. Unmistakably his.
I told myself noticing didn’t mean anything. Most days, I believed it.
Aubrey studies me. “You’re not wrecked about it.” It’s not a question.
“No.” That partis true. “I’m fine.”
“Then go,” she says simply. “You don’t have to keep avoiding places and people because of history.”
I look back at my phone.
The last two months haven’t been dramatic. Mending doesn’t look like erasing. It looks like repeating new patterns until they overwrite old ones. It looks like learning how to exist in a world where someone mattered, and choosing yourself anyway.
“I don’t want this to mean anything.”
“It doesn’t have to,” Aubrey says. “Lunch isn’t a contract. Eat a salad. Leave if you hate him. That’s the plan.”
She’s right. I know it.
“Still,” she adds more gently, “it’s movement.”
I set my phone down and turn back to my laptop. Finals are done. One lab report left. The rest of the semester is more like tying up loose ends than obligations; things already decided, waiting to be closed.
“What are you doing this summer again?” Aubrey asks, nudging a pile of index cards aside.
“Visiting my grandmother.”
She hums. “Romania.”
“Yes.”
I pick up my phone again.
“I don’t want to reopen anything,” I say.
“You’re not reopening,” Aubrey says. “You’re checking it’s still closed.”
That makes me pause.
“He hasn’t tried to talk to me,” I say. “Not once.”
“I know,” she says. “Which is why this is probably okay.”
I think of the careful distance. The way he neverappeared where he shouldn’t. The absence that felt intentional instead of avoidant.
That matters.
I type before I can overthink it.
WREN
