The first morning of the new routine had felt like physical torture. The second was only slightly less terrible. But by the third week, the ungodly hour had crystallized into a routine my body performed automatically.

It wasn’t a good routine, just a persistent loop.

Every single morning started with the exact same sequence. An alarm blasted through the quiet dark far too early, triggering a few solid minutes of deep, internal regret over every single decision that had led me to this final semester. Then, I’d drag myself out into the freezing air to meet Jason and Sam before the sun had even cleared the horizon.

Sam, predictably, never stopped fighting the system.

“This level of sleep deprivation should honestly be illegal,” Sam muttered one morning, pulling his collar up to his chin as we waited outside the locked tuition gate.

“You say that literally every single day, Sam,” I said, my own breath pluming into a white cloud in the chilly air.

“Because every single day it remains a fundamental truth.”

Jason ignored both of us, intensely focused on his notebook as he checked the time on his phone, making sure we were positioned to secure our usual seats the second the doors opened. As always, Jason was the anchor keeping our chaotic group in line.

The strange thing about a harsh routine is how quickly your mind normalizes it. Soon enough, the biting winter mist, the eerily empty roads, and the hazy, half-asleep morning lectures stopped feeling like a punishment. They just became the background landscape of our lives.

Even the tuition classroom itself became a familiar environment. The professor explained complex theory, students scribbled down formulas, and everyone collectively pretended they were far more awake than they actually were. Life moved forward in steady, predictable blocks.

And somewhere in the middle of that rigid routine, Ava simply became a part of it.

It didn’t happen intentionally. It was just a natural part of my day that my brain expected to find. At first, spotting her in that crowded, unfamiliar room had been a shocking coincidence. Now, the novelty had worn off. I’d walk through the door, my eyes would perform their automatic sweep of the middle rows, and if she was sitting in her usual spot, my mind would just settle down. Her presence felt expected.

And that new baseline should have worried me far more than it did.

A few weeks into the term, I noticed a subtle shift. She had started recognizing me, too.

At least, that was the conclusion my overthinking brain kept reaching. The first few instances of eye contact could easily be dismissed as simple coincidences. The classroom was large, but it wasn’t infinite; people looked around when they were bored, and paths crossed. It happened to everyone.

But as the days bled together, the pattern became much harder to explain away.

One bleak Tuesday morning, I looked up from tracing a difficult diagram in my notebook, casually scanning the room to clear my head. My eyes drifted toward the middle row, only to find her already looking directly back in my direction.

There was a sharp, frozen micro-second where our gazes locked. Then, both of us snapped our heads down instantly, fixing our eyes intensely on our respective desks.

I spent the next ten minutes staring blankly at my page, pretending to be deeply engrossed in the professor’s lecture. The concept he was explaining was probably highly critical for our final marks. I couldn’t remember a single syllable of it. *Did she just realize I’m the guy from the back row?* my mind looped frantically. *Great. Now I look completely ridiculous.*

Another morning, the interaction happened while we were leaving the building.

The final bell had just rung, and the room dissolved into sudden chaos. Students were aggressively stuffing sheets into their bags, heavy wooden chairs were scraping against the floor tiles, and someone in the front row dropped a massive plastic binder, scattering papers everywhere.

In the middle of the crowd’s hurried exit, our paths converged near the narrow doorway. For a brief, unprotected moment, our eyes met again.

Nothing dramatic happened. There was no polite smile, no hesitant wave, and certainly no casual conversation. We didn’t know each other. It was just pure, mutual recognition. It was the look you give to someone whose face has crossed your path enough times to be permanently saved in your memory.

Which was exactly what we were to each other. Classmates sharing a crowded timeline. Nothing more.

At least, that was the logical lie I kept running through my head to keep my defenses up.

As the winter chill deepened, the overall attendance at the coaching institute began to drop significantly. The brutal morning temperatures drove people away; some students switched entirely to the recorded online modules, while others simply drifted out of the roster completely.

The professor complained about the empty wooden benches every single morning, delivering stern warnings about exam percentages to the thinning crowd. Nobody really listened. Not even Jason, though he did an impressive job of pretending to take notes to maintain appearances.

Then, on a gloomy Monday morning, Ava wasn’t there.

I noticed the empty chair the exact second I stepped over the threshold. The instant realization deeply annoyed me, leaving a strange, sudden emptiness in my chest. *I shouldn’t have noticed that fast,* I thought, forcing my eyes down as I walked to the back row. *It’s an empty desk. People skip class all the time.*

I forcefully spent the rest of the two hours staring at the whiteboard, gripping my pen tightly and focusing entirely on the lecture. It worked. Mostly.

The next day, however, her seat was empty again.

This time, my eyes checked the window row before my brain could even stop them. That strange, hollow feeling from the previous semester break rushed right back into my stomach. It wasn’t an active concern—not yet. It was just the unsettling awareness of a missing piece. It was like walking into your own room and instinctively knowing that one small, specific object on your shelf had been moved out of place.

The walls looked the same, the ambient noise of the students was identical, yet the room felt fundamentally altered. I couldn’t explain why.

The third day didn’t offer any relief.

Morning tuition came. No Ava.

Our regular afternoon college classes rolled around. Still no Ava.

I spent the better part of the afternoon lunch break sitting on the brick wall by the parking lot, aggressively telling myself that a stranger’s daily schedule was absolutely none of my business. Then, I spent the remaining hours of the day proving to myself that it clearly, frustratingly did matter. My attention span was completely shot.

The concrete answer finally arrived a few days later, during our mid-week practical lab session at the main campus.

The lab professor was lazily rolling through the attendance register, his voice flat against the hum of the cooling fans. Half the class wasn’t even listening, hunched over their monitors, while the other half was frantically typing out code to meet the timed submission deadline. Everything felt entirely normal until the professor’s voice paused mid-line.

“Roll number forty-two... Ava?”

The name echoed off the concrete walls. One of the girls from her usual window-row group looked up from her screen. “She’s sick, sir. She won’t be coming in today.”

“Is it a standard medical leave? When will she return to submit her lab journals?”

“I’m not entirely sure, sir. She’s been down with a really bad fever since the weekend.”

The professor gave a brief nod, ticked a box on his sheet, and seamlessly continued down the list of names. The entire interaction had lasted less than ten seconds. Nobody in the room seemed particularly affected by it. The lab moved on, students returned to their work, and the brief moment disappeared into the background.

For everyone except me.

Sick. The word settled heavily in my mind, refusing to leave my head. It stayed with me longer than it had any logical right to. It wasn’t because I knew her—I didn’t. It wasn’t because I had a way to help—I didn’t even have her number.

Yet, the overthinking questions kept looping in the background of my thoughts. *Is it just a seasonal flu? Is she tracking the notes from home? Is she going to be okay?* They were questions without any possible answers.

That evening, I sat at my desk at home, determined to put my head down and work. The textbook was propped open, my practical files were laid out, and my screen was bright. But absolutely nothing was passing through my mind.

The same five-letter word kept distracting me. Sick.

I let out a long, defeated sigh and pushed the heavy textbook aside, rubbing my face with both hands. *This is completely ridiculous,* I thought, staring at the blank wall. *There is literally nothing I can do. There is zero reason for me to be wasting my energy on this.*

Yet, the thoughts remained locked in place.

Before turning off my desk lamp to go to sleep, I found myself doing something I hadn’t planned, something that didn’t fit into any logical framework I lived by.

I looked out the dark window into the quiet night, and I made a silent, unprompted wish. A simple, internal thought directed into the emptiness.

*I hope she’s okay.*

The gravity of what I had just done hit me a second later. I lay back on my pillow, staring up at the shadows casting across the ceiling fan, and let out a quiet, breathless laugh at my own complete lack of control.

Somewhere along the way, this unspoken feeling in my head had become much more complicated than I ever wanted to admit. And the absolute worst part was that I was finally running out of ways to explain it away.