(AN: Hmm I just took my dogs for a walk and I cant feel my hands I hate the cold its currently at a feels 1 degrees out and now I wait for the snow and more cold yay raise a double middle finger to the sky. Sorry for mini rant enjoy this chap.)
September 1992 · UT Austin
The drive back to Austin felt shorter than I remembered. Maybe the road didn't shrink; maybe I finally stopped measuring it. Dad didn't say much, and I didn't need him to. The silence between us had learned how to breathe.
When the campus gates came into view, he slowed but didn't pull over right away. "Keep your head down, stay ahead," he said, same words as last semester, but this time they sounded like pride disguised as advice. I nodded, shouldered my bag, and watched the truck disappear around the corner.
The dorm smelled exactly like last spring, detergent, paper, and old carpet trying to remember youth. My key stuck in the lock twice before turning. Inside, the room looked smaller. Familiarity always compresses things. I unpacked with deliberate order: notebooks, pens, the same alarm clock, a framed photo of Meemaw and Missy sitting on the porch. I set it on the shelf above the desk where I'd see it before anything else.
The air-conditioner clicked on with its usual indecision, half hum, half rattle. The sound settled into background rhythm, campus heartbeat resuming.
A knock came just as I was arranging the last stack of books. Paige leaned against the doorframe, two coffees in hand and a grin she probably rehearsed in case I'd forgotten how to smile.
"Reward for showing up on time," she said, handing me one.
"I didn't," I said, taking it anyway.
She looked around the room. "You even unpack alphabetically?"
"By function," I said. "Form follows system."
"God, you missed college," she said, but the laugh that followed softened it.
We talked about summer. She'd stayed in Austin for a short research internship, something to do with pattern recognition in early machine learning. I told her about Medford, about fireworks, about Meemaw's clock story. She listened like each sentence was a data point that actually mattered.
"You look less mechanical," she said finally.
"Debugged," I said.
"That's an improvement."
She perched on the edge of the desk, crossing her legs, surveying the room. "You ready for round two?"
"Always."
"Liar," she said, and left with the smell of coffee and static in her wake.
Dr. Li started the semester the way she always did: no preamble, no syllabus sermon, just chalk on board. Systems speak through change, she wrote in tall, deliberate strokes. "Every variable tells a story. Listen to its tone."
I wrote it down without needing to, mostly for the comfort of motion. Around me, pens scratched at different tempos. The classroom fan spun like a slow equation solving itself.
Paige leaned over and whispered, "You're already making formulas about communication, aren't you?"
I didn't answer; I didn't have to. The corner of her mouth curved, the mutual acknowledgment of predictable behavior.
Li kept going. "When you model flow, remember: stability is not silence. It's balance." The sentence might as well have been addressed to me. I wondered if she knew that.
When class ended, I lingered long enough for the chalk smell to fade before walking out. The hallway buzzed with the kind of excitement people mistake for energy. Paige fell into step beside me, as if we'd rehearsed it.
The library looked the same but older, maybe because we weren't. Eugene had claimed our old table and fortified it with snacks and notebooks. His hair was shorter, which somehow amplified his eccentricity instead of taming it.
"I ran simulations all summer," he said without looking up.
"On what?" Paige asked.
"Loneliness," he said. "Results were inconclusive."
"Sample size of one," I said.
He smiled. "You get me."
We worked until the sun dipped behind the humanities building, turning the glass into copper. Every sound, the flip of pages, the muted clack of keyboards, blended into a steady hum. Paige tapped her pen twice when she wanted me to look at a line; I slid the notebook her way without lifting my eyes. Tiny signals, well-tested protocol.
By nightfall, Eugene surrendered first, muttering about diminishing returns. Paige stretched, arms over her head, and winced. "First day back and my brain already needs a reboot."
"Cooling cycle," I said. "You'll be fine."
She glanced at me. "You really think I run that hot?"
"Combustion with purpose," I said.
Her grin returned, soft this time. "I'll take that as a compliment."
A week later, the rhythm settled. Morning runs, lectures, library, late-night pizza that tasted like fatigue and salt. Nothing new, and yet everything quieter. The campus trees began their half-hearted transition toward fall. Students still shouted through courtyards as if volume proved existence, but I had learned to filter.
Paige caught me once outside the math building, staring up at the lights strung between lampposts.
"You look like you're calculating their pattern," she said.
"I am."
"Of course you are."
She bumped my shoulder. "Sometimes you could just enjoy them."
"I am," I said. "Mathematically."
She rolled her eyes. "You're impossible."
"Statistically."
That evening the three of us ate at the small café across from the library, plastic chairs, radio humming through static. Eugene dismantled a grilled cheese into components of "cheese behavior under stress." Paige pretended to listen while sipping soda. I had my notebook open beside the plate, a few half-finished diagrams spreading across the page.
Paige watched me sketch a line, then said, "You ever think about how much of talking isn't words?"
Eugene said, "Most communication is subtext. My mother's sighs are practically Morse code."
She ignored him. "I mean between us. You ever notice how we say half a thing and the rest just lands?"
I nodded. "Efficiency."
She smirked. "Weirdness."
"Mutually inclusive," I said.
"Fine," she said, leaning back. "Then keep being efficient. I'll handle weird."
The conversation dissolved into the kind of silence that means nothing's missing.
Later that week, I sat by the window in my dorm. The air was thick but starting to remember how to cool. Outside, the courtyard lights flickered in slow Morse, faulty wiring pretending to be intentional. A group of freshmen passed below, laughing too loud, their echoes climbing the wall and thinning into the night.
I pulled out my notebook. The pages smelled faintly of pencil dust and time. I drew a small diagram.
Signal Integrity, Human.
Arrows labeled Words, Gestures, Pauses, Intent. Lines connecting them like circuits.
Not all clarity is volume, I wrote. Sometimes precision is silence received correctly.
I stared at the sentence until it stopped looking like words and started feeling like fact.
The clock ticked toward midnight. I thought about Meemaw's porch swing and Missy's pencil tapping. About Paige's grin when she said "debugged." About the unspoken messages that filled the spaces we used to call empty.
The campus outside hummed, a thousand machines, a thousand people, all sending and receiving without meaning to. I left the window open and let the noise in, because this time it sounded less like chaos and more like proof.
I closed the notebook, turned off the light, and listened until the signals blended into something that felt a lot like calm.
Thanks for reading, feel free to write a comment, leave a review, and Power Stones are always appreciated.
AN: I know two author notes is too much but I have went back and read the chapters and there are some things that I don't like but I wrote these chapters in October of last year and Im to lazy to redo so I hoped you still enjoyed.