Distance isn't always born of departure; sometimes, it is the quiet architecture of chosen silence.
Andini woke that morning to an unfamiliar emotional topography. It wasn't sorrow, nor was it peace. It was the liminal ache of something abandoned in the borderlands between sleep and waking—like a dream severed mid-sentence, her body drafted back into the unforgiving gravity of the real world.
She sat on the edge of her bed, watching the morning light carve dusty, pale fractures through the curtains.
Her phone delivered a muted vibration. A message from Fani.
"If you're exhausted today, you don't have to come to the library."
Andini let the words sit on the screen. Fani's texts were usually anchored in a light, observant familiarity. But this morning's offering felt guarded—a preemptive retreat, a boundary drawn before it was ever requested.
"I'll be there", Andini finally replied, offering nothing more. Pressing 'send' felt disproportionately heavy, like a stone dropped into deep water.
Across the city, Fani's morning unfolded with its usual, sterile clockwork. Her mother had vanished into the dawn commute; her siblings were absorbed in the orbits of their own lives.
No one lingered long enough to ask how Fani intended to survive the hours ahead.
Fani sat before her laptop, staring into the blinding white void of a blank screen.
The library was suffocatingly crowded that afternoon. Freshmen navigated the aisles with restless energy, their footsteps and localized whispers thickening the air.
Fani was already entrenched in their usual spot. Her wheelchair was parked at a slight, erratic angle—a testament to a hurried, anxious arrival. Two books lay open before her, their texts entirely ignored.
Andini arrived fifteen minutes late. Her hair was pulled back with utilitarian haste, and her eyes held a profound, inexplicable exhaustion she had no intention of explaining. They exchanged smiles, but the expressions were brittle, failing to reach their eyes.
"You look tired," Fani noted softly.
"I am," Andini replied, the answer clipped and sudden.
In the recent past, that single admission would have unlocked a torrent—a monologue about the hollow architecture of her house, the deafening silence of family dinners, or the micro-tragedies that accumulated into a crushing weight.
But today, the gate remained locked. They sat side-by-side in a silence that had lost its warmth. Pages were turned in a hollow pantomime of reading, but the space between them remained stubbornly unbridged.
"What's wrong?" Fani finally asked, her voice venturing into the frost.
Andini drew a long, ragged breath. "I just... I don't have the words today."
Fani nodded, but she felt a sudden hollowing in her chest. She knew the anatomy of that sentence. It was the prologue to isolation; the thing people said right before they locked the door from the inside and decided to carry the world alone.
The sky bruised into a deep orange. Their departure was rushed, an uncoordinated retreat.
Outside the glass doors, Andini hesitated. A confession clawed at her throat, begging to be let out, but the words bottlenecked, trapped by her own terror.
"Fan," she called out.
"Yes?"
Andini wavered. Her mind was a centrifuge of panic—the terrifying realization of how deeply she had allowed herself to anchor to another human being.
But all she managed to offer was a meager, "Get home safe."
Fani offered a gentle, wounded smile. "You too."
Andini's footsteps felt leaden as she walked away. Fani watched her go, asking herself a question she was far too terrified to answer.
That night, Andini sat bathed in the anemic glow of her desk lamp. A brutal truth crystallized in the quiet: Fani made her feel whole.
And that was precisely what terrified her. It was the paralyzing fear that this singular sanctuary—the only place she had ever truly felt she belonged—could vanish, plunging her back into an even deeper, more unbearable void.
Elsewhere, for the first time in an age, Fani felt the desperate urge to write—not as a distraction, but for her own survival.
She wrote of the newly seeded distance, of the soundless fractures forming in the ice. She wrote of two girls, both suffocating under the terror of loss, yet too cowardly to speak it aloud.