Campus had a rhythm. Not loud like a song, but steady like a heartbeat—lectures, quizzes, deadlines, repeat. Over time, you stopped hearing it. You simply moved to the beat.
Clara and I were moving in sync.
It was mid-semester, and things were starting to speed up. Assignments piled up, group projects became chaotic, and lecturers started throwing in "surprise" quizzes as if they were doing us a favor. The tension in the air was palpable. People stopped dressing up for class, and their eyes started to carry that tired, glassy look of burnout.
But somehow, with Clara around, things felt manageable. Or maybe I just believed they were.
We still studied together regularly. Not every day, but often enough that it didn't need planning anymore. If I didn't text her first, she would text me. If one of us missed class, the other would send notes. Somewhere along the way, we became each other's safety net. We didn't talk about it—we just let it be.
One Wednesday evening, I was in the cafeteria with my roommate, Darren, halfway through a sad plate of jollof when he leaned in suddenly and asked, "Are you and Clara dating?"
I blinked. "What?"
He shrugged, stuffing a spoonful of rice into his mouth. "You two are always together. People are asking."
I looked away. "We're just course mates."
"That close, huh?" He raised an eyebrow.
I didn't answer, mostly because I didn't know how.
We weren't dating. We weren't even flirty. But there was something there—something unspoken. It lived in the way we sat close but never touched, how she always saved me a seat, and how I caught myself thinking about her during classes she wasn't in. That same night, she texted me.
Clara: You up?
Me: Yeah. You okay?
Clara: Trying to work on this algorithm question. My brain is shutting down.
Me: You want to call?
She didn't reply right away. Then:
Clara: Yeah.
A few seconds later, my phone rang. We didn't talk about the question for long—maybe ten minutes. The rest of the call was random: memes, childhood stories, and complaining about the heat and the water outages. I learned she had a younger brother who annoyed her to death but cried when she left home, and she found out I used to want to be an architect because I liked drawing houses when I was a kid.
The call lasted almost two hours. After it ended, I stared at the ceiling for a while. There was something dangerous in how easy it was to talk to her, like I was slipping into a space I couldn't afford to stay in. The next few weeks passed like that. We became closer—not in an obvious, PDA kind of way, just comfortable. She started showing up to our study sessions in slides and no makeup. I stopped pretending to organize my notes before she arrived. It felt normal. Safe.
Then one Friday afternoon, everything shifted—just a little, but enough to notice. We had finished a long lab practical and were walking back from the science block. The sun was relentless, and Clara had her hoodie tied around her waist, her hair pulled back with a pencil. She looked exhausted. "I hate the heat," she said. "You and every living organism," I replied.
She smirked. "Wanna stop for ice cream?" That was new. We detoured to the little frozen yogurt stand near the student center and sat under the only tree with working shade. She ordered coconut; I got vanilla. The bench creaked under our weight. For once, we didn't talk about school.
Instead, we discussed what we'd do if we weren't here—if we hadn't chosen this course, this school, this life. Clara said she might have studied music. I told her maybe I would've gone to art school. Then she said something I didn't expect.
"Do you ever feel like we're doing all this, and we're not even sure we want it?" I paused. "What do you mean?" "This course. This hustle. The pressure. Like we're all chasing this perfect future. But what if we get there, and it's not even ours?" I looked at her. She wasn't asking for answers, just voicing what she'd probably been thinking for a long time. "Yeah," I admitted.
"Sometimes I think we're so busy surviving it that we don't stop to ask if we want it."
She nodded slowly and then looked away. The silence between us wasn't awkward; it was full. Like we both understood something we couldn't say out loud.
That evening changed something. I started seeing Clara not just as a study partner or classmate, but as someone carrying the same weight I was—expectations, dreams, and doubts. And maybe that's what made it harder. The more I saw her clearly, the more I felt it.
A few days later, we had our mid-semester quiz.
It was brutal—one of those papers that made everyone leave the hall in silence, heads down, wondering what went wrong. Clara and I didn't even talk after. We just looked at each other and walked to the courtyard together, sitting on the edge of the flower bed. "That was an ambush," I said, breaking the silence.
She let out a short laugh. "I'm finished."
"You? Finished?
I watched you answer that matrix question in like five minutes." She leaned back on her hands. "I panicked halfway through. My brain just froze." For a moment, we sat there in silence again, watching the other students pass by—some lost in their thoughts, others chatting animatedly.
Then Clara turned to me and said quietly, "Sometimes I think I only manage because you're around."
I looked at her. "What do you mean?" "I mean it," she said. "You're the only reason I've kept up with half of this. You make it... less heavy."
That should've made me happy. And it did, in a way. But it also scared me because I felt the same way. I didn't want to need her like that. I didn't want to be the reason she lost focus or the reason I did. So I said, without really thinking it through, "Maybe we're leaning on each other too much."
She looked at me. "You think so?"
"I don't know," I muttered. "I just—maybe we should start giving each other some space and focus a bit more, especially with final exams coming up." The words hung in the air like something that had been dropped and cracked on the floor. She didn't respond right away. She just stood up slowly and brushed dust off her jeans.
"Yeah," she said. "Maybe you're right."
She didn't wait for me. She walked off before I could explain what I really meant—before I even knew what I really meant. That weekend was the first time in weeks that we didn't talk.
No texts. No calls. No library plans.Just... silence.
I kept telling myself it was for the best. That it would help us focus. That I needed it. But everything felt off. Lectures were quieter. My seat felt colder. I kept checking my phone even when I knew nothing would be there. I saw her in class, of course. She still sat in the same place, but not beside me. One seat apart. Just enough space to feel like a mile.
She looked fine—focused and composed. But her face didn't light up the way it used to when she saw me. That's when I realized something: we never officially became anything, but somehow, I still managed to mess it up.