This empty is different. This empty has a shape. The shape is a brass key on a kitchen table and a man’s voice sayingdon’t come backin an accent that used to say my name like it mattered.
The rain against the window. The thin walls. Someone’s television. A building full of people whose hearts are intact.
My face against the pillow. Dry. The tears won’t come because the emptiness is below tears, and this place has been?—
—hollowed.
Monday, Tuesday. I think it’s Wednesday. The fairy lights under the connecting wall glow at night and go dark at dawn, and that’s the only clock that works because my phone is face down on the desk where I put it after the fourteenth time I checked.
I don’t eat. Femi texts, Allan texts. Ron texts. I look at Ron’s name on the screen, I turn the phone over. Watch the fairy lights.
The photos are still on my phone. The ones from October, Facebook, his department page, and I saved them.
I scroll through them at 3 am. His face in the blue light. The one from the department webpage where he’s in a blazer and looks utterly professional, untouched, immune.
My dick does nothing.
The body knows. Before the brain, before the tears. It counts the cost: sleep that doesn’t come. Food that doesn’t register. Desire, gone.
I lie in the narrow bed. This emptiness has a shape.
Thursday. Femi.
He doesn’t knock. The door opens, and he’s standing there with a Tesco bag in one hand and three days’ worth of silence on his face.
The same joggers since Monday, hair that’s given up on direction, the pallor of ceiling stains and phone screens. He sees all of it.
‘Right,’ he says. He walks in. Puts the bag on the desk. Sits on the floor next to the bed.
Doesn’t sayare you okay.Doesn’t say anything. Just sits. Unpacks the bag: sandwich, crisps, a bottle of water, and a Mars bar. Lines them up on the carpet like an offering.
He is doing this. A knot in my throat. Close enough.
‘Eat,’ he says. ‘Then we’ll talk.’
I eat the sandwich. It tastes of nothing, but I eat it because Femi is watching, and the watching is the only structure my day has had since Monday. Enough.
Then I talk.
The whole thing. This one starts from the lecture theatre, from the hands and the marker, from the warm-up problem I solved before his pen stopped moving, and I didn’t raise my hand.
Femi listens. Doesn’t interrupt. He reacts—surprise when I describe the first office hour. The unreadable expression when I tell him about Vienna and Hugo and the courtyard. He knew some of it.
‘He said he’s the worst thing that ever happened to me.’
I hear my own voice. Flat. Shaped like his because they are his.
Femi doesn’t speak. Long enough that I think maybe he agrees.
‘Is he?’
A question that wants an answer.
I think about it. Properly.
I think about the warm-up challenge I solved in my head and didn’t raise my hand.
I think about the four days I spent in the halls doing nothing. Doing anything would have meant staying, and staying would have meant trying.
