I didn’t realize when it became a habit. Maybe because habits never announce themselves when they arrive. One day they’re just not there, and the next, they’ve quietly woven themselves right into the fabric of your daily routine.

College continued exactly as usual. There were endless lab assignments to write, complex practicals to simulate, and attendance percentages to worry about. Nothing about it was exciting. Nothing about it was particularly memorable. At least, that’s how it should have been.

One crisp morning, Jason arrived at our usual meeting spot looking unusually motivated. That alone was enough to make me highly suspicious.

“We’re actually attending every single lecture today,” Jason announced, his voice firm as he adjusted his backpack. “No skipping, no extended breaks at the tea stall. We need to lock down our internal marks.”

Sam stopped mid-scroll on his screen, looking genuinely horrified. “Who are you and what have you done with the real Jason?”

“I’m serious, Sam.”

“You sound sick, man. Do you have a fever?”

Jason ignored the jab, turning on his heel and heading straight toward the engineering block. An hour later, true to Jason’s word, all three of us were sitting in the back row of the lecture hall. For once in our lives, we had arrived before the professor even stepped into the room.

I leaned back in my plastic chair and let my eyes wander lazily around the environment. A few students were huddled together talking, some were still trickling through the front door, and others were frantically copying assignments they should have completed days ago.

Without a single conscious thought, my eyes began scanning the rows. Left to right. Row by row.

Then I abruptly froze, my grip tightening on the edge of my desk.

*What the hell am I doing?*

Panic flared in my chest. I forcefully yanked my gaze down and pulled out my phone, staring intensely at a blank home screen just to give myself something safe to look at. The professor arrived a few minutes later, the heavy wooden door clicking shut, and the strange moment disappeared into the background.

Or so I desperately hoped.

But a few days later, it happened again.

I walked through the classroom doorway, dropped my bag, and automatically looked around. Within a split second, my eyes instantly locked onto Ava sitting near the front row.

Only after my eyes had found her did the cold realization hit me: I hadn’t just looked around randomly. I had been actively looking for her.

That realization deeply bothered me. Not because of anything she had done, but because of me. *Why am I doing this? I barely even know her. We have never spoken a single word to each other. Not once.* The uncomfortable thought stayed stuck in my head far longer than I expected, looping in the background of my mind for the rest of the afternoon.

Later that week, we were scheduled for a grueling electronics practical session. Everyone was hunched over their respective benches, intensely focused on writing down their circuit observations. Because of the heavy workload, the lab was much quieter than usual.

At one point, during a lull in my own calculations, I overheard a quiet conversation coming from the very next row. I wasn’t intentionally trying to eavesdrop; the lab benches were just built incredibly close together.

“Hey, did you bring an extra calculator?” a guy from her batch whispered, sounding mildly panicked. “I think I left mine on my desk at home.”

There was a brief pause, the sound of a zipper opening, and then Ava spoke. Her voice was calm and steady. “You can use my spare one. I won’t need it until the final hour anyway.”

“Seriously? Thanks so much, Ava.”

“Yeah, no problem. Just don’t forget to give it back before you leave the lab.”

It was a simple, ordinary interaction. The exact kind of casual conversation that happened hundreds of times a day across the campus. Yet, for some inexplicable reason, the memory of it stuck to the walls of my brain.

I didn’t think about it immediately, or even during the ride home. But a few days later, while I was sitting alone in my room at night in the middle of a video game match, the memory suddenly flashed back into my mind out of nowhere.

I let out a soft, self-deprecating laugh, staring blankly at my monitor. *Why on earth did I remember that? It isn’t important. Absolutely nothing about a borrowed calculator is important.* Still, no matter how illogical it was, I remembered.

A week later, a similar incident occurred during a difficult theory lecture.

The professor stood at the whiteboard and tossed a highly complex logic question out to the entire room. Nobody answered. A heavy, suffocating silence dropped over the classroom as everyone actively avoided eye contact with the front desk.

From a few rows ahead of me, Ava calmly raised her hand. She didn’t do it dramatically to show off, nor did she look entirely confident. She just did it because someone needed to answer.

As she explained her logic, she got the middle section of the formula wrong. A few guys sitting in the center row immediately let out a loud, obnoxious chuckle.

My chest instantly tightened on her behalf, my own deepest fear of public embarrassment flaring up just from watching it happen to someone else. *If that were me, I would want the floor to open up and swallow me alive.*

But Ava didn’t freeze. She didn’t look mortified. Instead, she just let out a soft, genuine laugh at her own mistake, nodded along with the professor’s correction, and seamlessly fixed her answer on the fly.

The entire interaction lasted maybe thirty seconds. As the professor turned back to the board, she leaned back in her chair and absentmindedly twirled her silver multi-colored pen through her fingers, completely unfazed. Most people in the room had probably forgotten it ever happened by the time the lunch bell rang.

I hadn’t.

And that was rapidly becoming a serious problem. It wasn’t that I was sitting around thinking about her every second of the day—I wasn’t. The real issue was that my brain kept filing away details I had no reason to remember. Her habits, the silver pen, her voice, the way she wasn’t afraid of making a mistake in public.

No matter how much I tried to use logic to ignore it, the mental list just kept getting longer.

By the time the final week of the month rolled around, I knew one thing for certain.

I was paying attention. Far more attention than I had any right to.